Chapter 11 · The Editor
Find and Replace
Find and replace is the tool you reach for when a name changed in chapter nine, when you suspect you have written "suddenly" forty times, or when you need to get back to that one line about the harbour. Skarvia's version lives in a single bar, works on the document you have open, and is careful about one thing in particular: it will not quietly replace something other than the match you are looking at.
Opening the bar
Two ways in:
- The Find button at the right-hand end of the Home ribbon. It is there in every format, and it is the only ribbon button that does not move when the tabs change.
- ⌘F, or Ctrl+F on Windows and Linux, from anywhere on the page.
The keystroke opens Skarvia's bar rather than your browser's. That is the one you want here: the browser searches the page as it happens to be painted, and Skarvia searches the document. Pressing ⌘F again while the bar is already open selects whatever is in the search box, so you can type straight over your last search without reaching for the mouse.
What is on the bar
The bar appears above the manuscript, and reads left to right in the order you use it:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Find… | The text you are looking for. Searching starts as you type; there is no button to press first. |
| Aa | Match case. Off by default, so harbour finds
Harbour. Ticking it re-runs the search immediately. |
| The counter | Reads 3/17 for the third of seventeen matches. With a
query and nothing to show for it, it reads no matches. Empty the search box and it
goes blank. |
| ↑ and ↓ | Previous and next match. |
| Replace with… | The replacement text. Leave it empty to delete the match rather than change it. |
| Replace | Changes the one match currently highlighted. |
| All | Changes every match in the document. |
| ✕ | Closes the bar, clears the highlighting, and puts your cursor back in the manuscript. |
Every match is highlighted in the manuscript at once. The one you are on is picked out in the accent colour, the rest in the softer marker shade, so you can see how thickly a word is scattered through a chapter before you decide to do anything about it.
What counts as a match
Skarvia searches for the literal text you typed. There are no regular expressions, no wildcards,
and no whole-word toggle, so searching for art also finds it inside heart and
started. Adding a space on one or both sides is the usual way round that:
art finds the word and skips the rest.
What Skarvia searches is the text a reader sees. Footnote markers and other inserted objects contribute no characters of their own, and their positions are accounted for, so a match found after one lands on the words you were expecting rather than a character or two off.
A match cannot cross a paragraph. Searching is done block by block, so a phrase that runs from the end of one paragraph into the start of the next will not be found as a single match. In a screenplay the same applies across elements: a phrase split between a character cue and the dialogue underneath it is two blocks, and find sees two blocks.
Moving between matches
Enter in the search box goes to the next match, ⇧Enter to the previous one.
The ↑ and ↓ buttons do the same. Both wrap: past the last match
you arrive back at the first, and the counter tells you it has happened by resetting to
1/17.
Each step selects the match in the manuscript and scrolls it into view, which means you can walk the whole document from the search box and start typing over any match you land on.
Esc closes the bar while your focus is still on it, from the replace box and the buttons as well as from the search box. Once you have clicked back into the manuscript, that key belongs to the manuscript instead: it moves your focus out to the ribbon, and the find bar stays open. Close it with ✕, or click back onto the bar and press Esc there. Chapter 10 has the full order in which Esc is claimed.
Replacing
Replace changes the match currently highlighted and nothing else. The search re-runs straight afterwards, the count drops by one, and pressing Replace again takes the next one. Slower than All, and the honest option when some instances should change and some should not.
All replaces every match in the document in one go, then reports what it did in
place of the counter: replaced 12. Two things follow from that, and both surprise
people the first time:
- The search is cleared afterwards. The highlighting goes with it. Type in the search box again to start a fresh search; nothing is broken.
- It is a single undo. One ⌘Z puts all twelve back. If you replaced the wrong thing across ninety pages, that is the keystroke, and it is worth pressing before you do anything else rather than trying to repair it by hand.
An empty replacement field is allowed and means what it looks like: All with nothing in the right-hand box deletes every match. Skarvia does not ask you to confirm, so read the counter before you press it.
Suggestion mode, and reviewers
With suggestion mode on, a replacement is proposed rather than performed. The old text stays on screen struck through, the new text arrives beside it as an insertion, and the owner accepts or rejects it from the Changes tab in the rail like any other suggestion.
Two consequences worth knowing while you are working that way. Search still finds struck text, because it is still on the page and you should be able to search what you can read. Replace, on the other hand, steps over the runs it has already marked, so pressing it repeatedly moves forward through the document instead of landing on the same sentence twice.
If you are on a document as a reviewer, Replace and All are disabled and carry the tooltip "Reviewers suggest and comment. The owner formats and restructures." Searching, counting and stepping through matches all work normally. Part VII covers the roles and what each one may do.
Renaming a character
For a character's name in a screenplay, find and replace is the wrong tool and there is a right
one. The Script tab has Rename Character, which opens a
Rename character dialog with a dropdown of the names already in your script and a
New name field. It renames the character cues, uppercasing the new name as a cue
requires, and it keeps any extension in brackets, so MARGOT (V.O.) becomes
ROSA (V.O.) rather than losing the (V.O.).
The checkbox Also update mentions in action & dialogue extends the change to the prose, matching whole words only and setting the name in title case where it appears in a sentence. The status bar reports the total, in the form Renamed in 34 places. If the script has no character cues yet, the button says so rather than opening an empty dialog.
Find and replace would have caught Margot inside Margotte and shouted the name in the middle of a line of action. Use the dialog.
What find will not do
- It does not search your project. One document at a time. Open the other chapter and search there.
- It does not search comments, findings, or the Codex. The bar reads the manuscript. The rail has its own tabs, and Chapter 9 describes them.
- It does not find formatting. There is no way to search for every italic phrase or every scene heading. The navigator down the left-hand side is the tool for moving by structure.
- Case-insensitive matching has one gap. A character whose lowercase form is a
different length, the Turkish dotted capital
İ, is left alone so that every match keeps its correct position. Tick Aa and search for the exact form.
None of this touches the AI staff. Find and replace changes the text you tell it to change, where you tell it to, and nowhere else.
Updated 2026-08-18 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?