Find next -- everywhere!

2 February 2013, 01:00

Here’s a tiny tip that I’ll bet you didn’t know.

Command+F can be used in most OS X apps to open the search bar or dialog box. We all know that.

But did you know that, once the first instance of the word/phrase has been found, you can hit Command+G repeatedly to automatically jump to the next instances? Shift+Command+G will do the same but backwards.

What’s really cool is that if you then switch to another document, web page or browser tab, you can hit Command+G to keep searching there too — without any need to re-enter the search term or even open the search bar/dialog box. You can even close the original app, then open another, and be able to search there with Command+G.

For what it’s worth, this is possible because OS X has a special clipboard solely for the search field that’s shared amongst applications.

However, if you want to search for further examples of a particular word of phrase that you see in a document or web page, you can just highlight the word/phrase, then hit Command+E to automatically paste it into the search clipboard, then tap Command+G to find instances of it elsewhere in the document.

Disagree? Tell me why...

 
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