20. Searching and Replacement

Like other editors, Emacs has commands for searching for occurrences of a string. The principal search command is unusual in that it is incremental; it begins to search before you have finished typing the search string. There are also nonincremental search commands more like those of other editors.

Besides the usual replace-string command that finds all occurrences of one string and replaces them with another, Emacs has a more flexible replacement command called query-replace, which asks interactively which occurrences to replace. There are also commands to find and operate on all matches for a pattern.

You can also search multiple files under control of a tags table (see section Searching and Replacing with Tags Tables) or through the Dired A command (see section Operating on Files), or ask the grep program to do it (see section Searching with Grep under Emacs).