Whether you made errors while writing, have text you need to update, or want to do some text cleanup, DEVONthink can help modify text in a document.
If you need to replace words in the text of a document, start off with a search. Select the document and press ⌘F to open the Search inspector. Type in the word you need to replace and press Return. If you don’t find matches, adjust the search term. For multi-word searches, surround them with double quotes. Once you’re finding matches, enter your replacement text in the Replace field. Then, you have three options for the replacement:
- Replace: Select the first occurrence in the inspector or press the > button. Press Replace to change the text. If not, press the forward arrow again or press ⌘G (the shortcut for Edit > Find > Find Next) and press Replace when needed.
- All: Literally replaces all the matched strings with the replacement text. Be careful with this, especially in longer documents.
- In Selection: This also replaces all matches but more safely in selected text. This helps avoid accidental replacements.
As an example, if I had a document with Devonthink in it, I could enter the replacement text DEVONthink, press the All button and fix them all at once. If I needed to be more careful, I could use one of the other options.
Here’s a power-tip: If you enable Ignore Case, you will get more matches. While you need to pay a bit more attention, it can be useful e.g., it would also match and replace DevonTHINK as well.
Note: This only works in text documents, you can edit in DEVONthink.