Search for a target within a project

Find the search string in a project

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+F or select Edit | Find | Find in Files from the main menu.

2. In the search field, type your search string. Alternatively, in the editor, highlight the string you want to find and press Ctrl+Shift+F. WebStorm places the highlighted string into the search field.

   To see a list of your previous searches, press Alt+Down.

   If you need, specify the additional options.

   

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   WebStorm lists the search strings and the files that contain them. If the search string is found several times on the same line of code, WebStorm merges the results in one line.

   To do a multi-line search, click the icon to enter a new line, and press Ctrl+Alt+Down/Ctrl+Alt+Up to browse through occurrences.

3. Check the results in the preview area of the dialog where you can replace the search string or select another string, press Ctrl+Shift+F again and start a new search.

4. To see the list of occurrences in a separate tool window, click Open in Find Window. Use this window and its options to group the results, preview them, and work with them further.

   If you want to see each new search result in a separate tab in the Find tool window, click on the bottom of the Find in Files dialog and select the Open Results in New Tab checkbox.

Narrow your search

You can use different options in the Find in Files dialog to adjust your search process.

• Select options such as Words () or Match case () to find the exact word in a project or match the letter case.

• With selected, WebStorm automatically escapes special regex symbols with backslash \ when you search for a text string that contains them.

  note

  Keep in mind that if you copy (Ctrl+C) the string first and then paste (Ctrl+V) it in the search field, the regex symbols will not be taken into account.

  For more details on regex, refer to the search with regex documentation.

• Click the icon to filter your search. For example, you can filter the search to omit comments or search only in comments instead.

• Select Directory to limit your search to a specific folder.

  Moreover, you can select the Scope option that offers you a list of predefined scopes for your search. For example, you can limit your search to the scratch files in your project.

  

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  If you work without tabs, the scope Recently Viewed Files or Recently Changed Files option might become quite useful. You can also create your own custom scope, click the Browse icon () to open the Scopes dialog.

Search in the specific file types

Use the File Mask option to narrow your search to a specific file type. You can select the existing file type from the list, add a new file type, or add an additional file mask syntax to search for file types with certain patterns.

1. In the Find in Files dialog, select the File Mask checkbox and from the list of file types, select the one you need.

   

   WebStorm limits its search to the specified type.

2. If you don't find the file type you need in the list, enter your file type in the File Mask field.

   For example, use the following syntax to search only in json files: *.json.

   You can manually add a file mask in the search field. If necessary, specify several file types separating them with commas.

   

Replace the search string in a project

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+R to open the Replace in Path dialog.

2. In the top field, enter your search string. In the bottom field, enter your replacement string.

   

3. Click one of the available Replace commands.