Find and replace
What the find and replace tool does
This app searches a block of text for every occurrence of a word or phrase and swaps each one for something else, all in one pass. Type what you're looking for, type what should replace it, and every match gets updated at once instead of you hunting through the text one instance at a time.
It's local. The whole thing runs in your browser, nothing you paste is uploaded, and there's no cap on how much text you process or how often.
Since this is often run on a whole document, a draft, a set of notes, that local-only processing is worth being direct about: bulk text edits shouldn't require trusting a server with the full content just to swap one phrase for another.
Workflow
How to find and replace text in three steps
Two fields, then done.
- Step 1
- Paste your text and enter what to find.
- Step 2
- Enter what to replace it with.
- Step 3
- Press Replace all and copy the result.
How matching works
This matches literally, not as a whole word
This app looks for the exact sequence of characters you typed, anywhere it appears, including buried inside a longer word. Search for 'cat' and it catches the 'cat' inside 'concatenate' just as readily as a standalone 'cat', since there's no whole-word toggle checking for a boundary on either side.
If a whole-word match matters, build that into what you search for: a leading or trailing space, or the punctuation you'd expect around it, keeps a match from landing inside a longer word by accident.
Case matters here
Matching is case sensitive
This app matches capitalization exactly. A search for 'Report' won't find 'report' or 'REPORT'. If your text uses inconsistent capitalization for the same term and you need every variant caught, run the tool once per capitalization, or normalize the case first with the case converter and search for one consistent form after.
That's a deliberate choice rather than a gap: a case-sensitive search is predictable and never changes a capitalization you didn't intend to touch, even if it means running the tool more than once on inconsistently capitalized text.
The hidden failure mode
Why a search can miss text you're staring right at
Typing what you see only works if what you typed is actually the same character as what's sitting in the text. A straight apostrophe typed on a keyboard is a different character from a curly one that arrived through a copy and paste, and a search for one will never find the other, despite looking nearly identical on screen.
The same thing happens with hyphens versus en dashes versus minus signs, or a regular space versus a non-breaking one. If a find-and-replace isn't matching text you can clearly see, the likely cause is that the character you typed and the character actually there are different codepoints that just render the same way. Copying the exact text you're searching for straight out of the source, rather than retyping it, sidesteps this entirely.
Why it matters
What inconsistent find-and-replace causes
A rename that only catches some occurrences leaves a document referring to two different names for the same thing. A search that silently fails because of a look-alike character can lead someone to conclude a phrase isn't in a document at all, when it's actually there repeatedly, just encoded slightly differently than expected.
In bulk text edits, an overly broad match with no whole-word awareness can quietly corrupt words that happened to contain the search term as a substring, an error that's easy to skip past on a quick read.
Who it's for
Who uses a find and replace tool, and when
Writers and editors swap a name, a term or a phrase consistently across a long document. Developers update repeated boilerplate, a company name, a version number, a placeholder, in content sitting outside a codebase with its own built-in find-and-replace tooling.
It also comes up removing a recurring stock phrase from AI-generated drafts, or correcting a term that got consistently misspelled or mis-capitalized throughout a document.