Search

Two ways to find things beyond the current file, sharing one rule: the scope is a visible, editable path. Both panels show exactly where they look — the current document's project by default — and widening the search is literally editing that path (up to ~ or / if you like). Search never silently looks somewhere you did not expect.

Both walks are gitignore-aware, skip hidden files, and cap file sizes, courtesy of ripgrep's own engine embedded in the core — not a subprocess.

Open Quickly (⌘T)

Type fragments of a file name — editwc finds EditorWindowController.swift — with fzf-style fuzzy matching and ranking. ↑/↓ move the selection, ⏎ opens (fronting the window if the file is already open), ⎋ closes. An empty query browses the scope alphabetically. The same stacked filters as Find in Project apply here too — every filter kind refines the matched paths — and the status line says how many matches the filters pruned.

⏎ searches, ⌘⏎ opens (Ctrl+⏎ on Linux): refining a query should never open a file by accident. ↑/↓ move the selection, ⎋ closes, and a double-click opens too. The status strip spells this out.

The scope is walked once when the panel opens, then matched in memory — typing stays instant on a real repository, and the file count in the status line tells you what is being searched. A scope with more files than the walk limit says so, so "narrow the scope" is advice rather than a guess.

Find in Project (⇧⌘F)

The query is a regular expression; results stream in as path:line: text. ⏎ jumps straight to the matching line. Results are capped (200) to stay instant; refine the pattern rather than scrolling.

Case follows the smart-case rule ripgrep made familiar: an all lowercase query matches any case, while a query containing an uppercase letter is matched exactly. So todo finds TODO, and TODO finds only TODO.

A line under the results says what the search did — "18 matches in 4 files · 812 searched", "No matches in 812 files searched", or the reason nothing could be searched at all (a scope that does not exist, one where everything is ignored, or a bad pattern, quoted). An empty result is never mute, so a mistyped pattern or a wrong scope announces itself instead of looking like an absence of matches.

Stacked filters

Under the Find in Project query, ＋ Add Filter stacks refinements:

• line contains / line excludes — the matching line's text;
• file contains / file excludes — the hit's file path.

Filters are case-insensitive substrings and combine with and: lines with foo where bar also appears, but not in files with test in the name, is the query foo plus line contains bar plus file excludes test. File excludes prune whole files before they are even opened, so filtered searches stay as fast as plain ones.

The selected word

Selecting a whole word marks the other places it appears in the visible text — a grey tint, distinct from the selection and from the find bar's matches, so the three stay apart. Selecting part of a word, or a stretch spanning several, marks nothing: those selections were made for some other reason.

⎋ puts the marks away and leaves the selection, so the word is still there to act on. Editing or selecting elsewhere asks the question again. The search covers what is on screen, which is what a mark can be seen on, so a long file costs what a short one does.

Two settings in Settings ▸ Editor decide what counts: whether Item is item, and whether item inside items is one. Both are off by default — a name that differs in case is a different name, and the word was selected as a word.

The jump stack

Every jump — a search result, Jump to Definition, a reference, an outline entry, a chum open — records where it left from. Go Back (⌃⌘←) walks those origins; Go Forward (⌃⌘→) retraces. The history is rewritten from the current point: jumping somewhere new discards the forward trail, exactly as vim's jumplist does. Positions survive edits as line/column, so going back after a change lands close, not lost.

Not there yet

• Replace across files.
• Explicit case/whole-word toggles in the panel (smart case covers the common case, and the pattern itself can express both).
• Persisted search history.