

Open its extended options by clicking on the disclose button at the lower left of that dialog, and check the ‘Use wildcards’ option to engage its limited regex mode. In Microsoft Word, use the Edit menu, Find item and select the Advanced Find and Replace… command to display the Find and Replace dialog. Microsoft Word allows its own limited version of regex in searches. To some degree or other, these are available in most scripting languages, including PHP, Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, and Java, some command line tools such as grep, and in more sophisticated text and other editors such as BBEdit and Microsoft Word, as well as some modules basic on the Open Office suite.ĭespite the name, their implementations are by no means consistent or regular: to find all words beginning with ‘Chap’ or ‘chap’ and ending with ‘n’, you might search for \bhap+n\b in BBEdit, but in Microsoft Word. The most common and most powerful method of constructing compound search terms (and more) is by means of Regular Expressions, normally abbreviated to regex. There is detailed information on improving Google searches here, and local Spotlight search here. Spotlight is quite happy to deal with partial terms, and searching for ‘publisher book non-fiction Chap’ should produce a usefully refined search. Often we have partial information: we cannot recall whether the publisher’s name was Chaplin, Chapman, or something similar, so to narrow the field further we might add a term that would pick up all those.ĭepending on the search engine we are using, this might be ‘Chap*’, although Google will not accept the * character as indicating a ‘wild card’, so as to include any words starting with the letters ‘Chap’. Instead of looking just for ‘publisher’, you would normally supply additional terms to help select more relevant results, such as ‘book’ and ‘non-fiction’, although this will still return millions of hits using Google. Despite increasingly smart search engines, getting the best out of them requires us to learn how to refine searches, to focus them so that they return just the ‘hits’ that we want. Most searches, using Spotlight, Google, or any other engine of your choice, return too many results, of which the great majority are usually irrelevant. NOTE: Due to an increase in spam, URLs are forbidden! Please provide search terms or fragment your URLs so they don't look like URLs.Although most are familiar with some shorthand notation used in searching, Regular Expressions turn this into a programming language. The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything? Please enable JavaScript and reload the page. JavaScript is required to submit comments due to anti-spam measures. Culprits may be publicly humiliated at my sole discretion. Spam and off-topic posts will be deleted without notice. Don't want the NSA or anybody else listening in on your phone calls? Grab Zfone plus a VoIP client such as Gizmo and you can make easy, encrypted calls for free. Ever see somebody type out a bunch of ^H^H^H^H^H to indicate an ironic typing "mistake"? This explains the origins of this silliness^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H idea. DS_Store files all over your non-Mac network drives.

Apple Technote which describes how to keep your Mac from littering. When The Internet Attacks: amusing internet-related absurdity. Terminal Futility "Routine airport security won't thwart jihadists, but it does inconvenience and endanger the rest of us." The real deal on airport security, and why it's so useless. A great book that will teach you how to use the Common Lisp programming language: available in printed form and free on the web. How to set up encryption certificates with Mail.app in Mac OS X so that you can automatically sign and encrypt your mail with virtually no effort. It's like VersionTracker, except it doesn't suck. MacUpdate is a comprehensive list of Mac software. Great for writing web pages or programs on another computer. When used with SubEthaEdit, you can transparently edit text files on a remote server. As a bonus, SubEthaEdit lets you collaborate with another person (or many others) over the internet on the same document. SubEthaEdit, the best lightweight text editor for the Mac. Read the real (slightly censored) flight manual for one of the most amazing airplanes ever built. If you know what "Halo" is, it's a must-see. Red vs Blue is a weekly comedy show acted out in Halo. Great site for Cocoa development on the Mac. Great for documentation or just random thoughts.
You can type on multiple pages, and VoodooPad links them together automatically based on their titles.

This program is great, it's like a notepad on steroids.
