Find and replace

Search is literal, and within the open file. There is no regular-expression mode and no find-in-files; both are recognised and say so when pressed rather than reporting an unknown command.

Finding

ctrl+f opens the bar, seeded from the selection if there is one — selected, so the next thing typed replaces it rather than appending. Typing narrows the query, enter and F3 step forward, shift+enter and shift+F3 step back, and both wrap. alt+c and alt+w toggle case sensitivity and whole-word matching; a capital letter in [aa ww] means the option is on.

Key	Command
ctrl+f	actions.find
F3 / enter	editor.action.nextMatchFindAction
shift+F3 / shift+enter	editor.action.previousMatchFindAction
alt+c	toggleFindCaseSensitive
alt+w	toggleFindWholeWord
escape	closeFindWidget

Every match is highlighted with editor.findMatchHighlightBackground and the current one with editor.findMatchBackground — VS Code’s own theme keys, and its own distinction between the match you are on and the rest. The readout on the right is 3 of 7; if you move the cursor off a match it becomes 7 results, because claiming you are still on the third would be a lie.

F3 works with the bar closed. With no query yet it searches for the selection, or for the word under the cursor, and reports where it landed in the status bar — which is the only place a count can go once the bar is gone.

Case sensitivity defaults to off, which is what VS Code’s find widget does. That is the opposite of ctrl+d, where you selected exactly the text you meant.

Replacing

ctrl+h opens the same bar with a second row. tab and shift+tab move between the two inputs, enter on the replacement replaces the current match and steps to the next, and ctrl+alt+enter replaces every match in one undo step.

The keyboard starts on whichever field is left to fill in: on the replacement when the query arrived seeded from a selection or was typed earlier, and on the query when there is nothing to replace yet.

Key	Command
ctrl+h	editor.action.startFindReplaceAction
enter (on the replacement)	editor.action.replaceOne
ctrl+alt+enter	editor.action.replaceAll
tab / shift+tab	deco.find.toggleField

Two deliberate refusals:

• A replace pressed while the cursor is not on a match steps onto one instead of changing anything. VS Code does the same, and it is the safe reading of an ambiguous keypress: replacing text you cannot see is worse than making you press the key twice.
• A match that already reads as the replacement is left out. Replacing foo with foo neither dirties the file nor adds an undo step. This is reachable rather than theoretical — a case-insensitive search for foo also finds FOO, so replacing foo with foo across foo FOO reports one replacement, not two.

An empty replacement deletes the matches, which is a legitimate thing to want.

The find input is a text input

While the find bar has the keyboard, editorTextFocus is false and textInputFocus is true — VS Code’s distinction, because its find box is a text input inside the editor. deco copies it deliberately, with two consequences worth knowing:

• ctrl+v pastes into the query, not into the file. ctrl+z cannot rewrite the document from behind an open bar; it is swallowed, along with ctrl+a and ctrl+x, which would otherwise select or cut in a document you are not looking at.
• tab, ctrl+space and ctrl+k ctrl+i stop resolving at all, because they are bound to editorTextFocus. No special-casing — the context key means what it means in VS Code.

The query has a caret and one possible selection: all of it. That is the state it opens in when ctrl+f seeds it from a selection, and the state ctrl+a puts it in — so the first thing typed replaces the seed instead of appending to it, and ctrl+a then backspace empties the field. ctrl+c and ctrl+x act on the whole query either way. A query longer than the bar scrolls to keep the caret visible, and on a terminal too narrow for everything the count is dropped first, the toggles second, and the query last: a search term you cannot see is one you cannot correct.

Whole-word matching differs from VS Code, on purpose

VS Code compiles the needle into \bneedle\b and so inherits \b’s definition: a transition between a word and a non-word character. With whole-word on, searching for ( therefore matches f(x) but not ` ( ` — behaviour that falls out of the regex engine rather than out of anything anyone asked for.

deco constrains only the ends of the needle that are themselves word characters. For every needle that begins and ends in a word character — every needle anyone types with the option on — the two agree.