Quit a find and replace

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paulcruice
Posts: 17
Joined: 2006-06-04 15:42:19
Location: Toowoomba, Australia

Quit a find and replace

Post by paulcruice »

Hi folks,
Is there any way to quit a find once it is in progress? I know that Cmd full stop and Cmd S don't work.
Cheers.
adryan
Posts: 561
Joined: 2014-02-08 12:57:03
Location: Australia

Re: Quit a find and replace

Post by adryan »

G’day, Paul et al

A Find/Replace on “the” in a 60,000-word document yielded a bit over 4,000 occurrences and took a couple of seconds on my computer.

If you are using Find/Replace in a macro and it is taking too long, Esc or Cmd+period should stop the macro. If that doesn’t work, or if you are not using Find/Replace in a macro, you should try Force Quit.

If this behavior persists when you are not using Find/Replace in a macro, and you are not having other problems with your computer, you should file a bug report.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Adrian
MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 2021)
macOS Ventura
Nisus Writer user since 1996
paulcruice
Posts: 17
Joined: 2006-06-04 15:42:19
Location: Toowoomba, Australia

Re: Quit a find and replace

Post by paulcruice »

Adrian, thanks for the reply.
The Find All that I was doing at the time was fairly complex. It was not a macro.
I tried Cmd period and Cmd S but I did not try Esc.
I have had this happen a few times now over the years.
Eventually I have to ForceQuit but one loses anything not saved.
May be I have to train myself to do a Cmd S to save every time I do a Find All.
Cheers and thanks for the help.
Paul Cruice
Jesus heals the rift between Man and Creator.
adryan
Posts: 561
Joined: 2014-02-08 12:57:03
Location: Australia

Re: Quit a find and replace

Post by adryan »

G’day, Paul et al

It’s a good idea to get into the habit of running complicated Find/Replace operations or macros on a duplicate of your life’s work, rather than risk everything on a single mouse-click. A Lorem Ipsum document (Macro > Document > Lorem Ipsum) can often be useful for testing, depending of course on the structure of the text in your main document.

Cheers,
Adrian
MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 2021)
macOS Ventura
Nisus Writer user since 1996
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phspaelti
Posts: 1313
Joined: 2007-02-07 00:58:12
Location: Japan

Re: Quit a find and replace

Post by phspaelti »

With Nisus you can just keep Autosave on. Mine is set to autosave every 10 minutes, and I keep backups in a separate location. If I force shut Nisus I usually get a recovered file. I can't really remember the last time I lost any serious amount of work, working with Nisus. (Even so I keep a lot of intermediate versions.)

Nisus' Powerfind can generally be undone (and macros too), but of course not if you happen on a Find that doesn't terminate in a useful amount of time and you are forced to use force quit. As Adryan says Nisus should be quick, even on big files. So if you are getting one that does not terminate in a useful amount of time, you have probably not optimised your expression properly (see for example this discussion http://www.nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=5914). It's not likely to be a bug.
Typical problems which cause non-ending find/replace actions are wildcards that are not delimited (e.g. an initial ".*" etc.).
If you are doing something complicated, using a macro might help.
philip
paulcruice
Posts: 17
Joined: 2006-06-04 15:42:19
Location: Toowoomba, Australia

Re: Quit a find and replace

Post by paulcruice »

Thanks Phillip and Adrian.
Cheers.
Jesus heals the rift between Man and Creator.
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