Search and Replace

Sublime Text features two main types of search:

We’ll examine them in turn, but first let’s talk about a powerful tool for searching text: regular expressions.

Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions find complex patterns in text. To take full advantage of the search and replace facilities in Sublime Text, you should at least learn the basics of regular expressions. In this guide we won’t explain how to use regular expressions.

Typing out regular expression gets boring fast, and saying it is even more annoying, so it is usually shortened to regexp or regex.

This is how a regex might look:

(?:Sw|P)i(?:tch|s{2})\s(?:it\s)?of{2}!

To use regular expressions in Sublime Text, you first need to activate them in the various search panels. The search term will otherwise be interpreted literally.

Sublime Text uses Perl Regular Expression Syntax from the Boost library.

See also

Boost library documentation for regular expressions
Documentation on regular expressions.
Boost library documentation for format strings
Documentation on format strings. Note that Sublime Text additionally interprets \n as $n.