Learning GNU Emacs, Second Edition

Search and Replace

You often want to combine a search operation with a replace operation. For example, if you spell poorly, you may want to replace every occurrence of recieve with receive. The hard way to do it is to search for recieve and, whenever you find it, make your change by hand. Emacs provides a search and replace operation that lets you fix every occurrence of the word recieve with a single command.

Simple Search and Replace Operations

First, let’s assume you’re in the situation we just described. You want to replace every occurrence of one string with another. There is no conceivable way that recieve could be correct, and absolutely no ambiguity about how you want to replace it. When you want to replace every instance of a given string, you can use a simple command that tells Emacs to do just that. Type ESC x replace-string RETURN, then type the search string and press RETURN. Now type the replacement string and press RETURN again. Emacs replaces all occurrences in the file from the cursor position onward. If you want to search and replace throughout the file, press ESC < or HOME to go to the beginning of the file before typing this command. Here’s a quick example of using replace-string.

Initial state:

Receive is misspelled as recieve three times on this screen, but the cursor is positioned after the first instance.

Now we’ll fix them.

Type: ESC x replace-string RETURN ...