This trick has helped me immensely. In my Copy Editing work, I frequently have to check how previous versions of documents used a word or phrase. Was it capitalized? Was it italicized? One of the ways I do this is by building up a style guide. But there are always words you didn’t realize you would need to check.
Here is how you can check other files for a text string¹, and see how the word or phrase was used.
Software
Make sure you have Notepad++ installed on your machine². This tabbed plain text editor is very useful, and I use it every day. When you have to switch between text or code in multiple files, you will be glad to have them all in one interface.
Search Across Files
- Open Notepad++
- Go to Search > Find in Files
- The regular Find dialogue box opens, but this time it asks for a directory. Point it to where you have your working files.
Note that you can replace all instances of a string with a new string across multiple files via this method, too, using the “Replace in Files” button. - Enter the text string you are looking for. Here, I searched for “motif” because I didn’t know if we italicized it as we did with other foreign language words.
- The instances of the string show up in red, highlighted in yellow. The context also shows up around it.
Because Notepad++ is a plain text editor, it does not show formatting. It only shows the plain text and the text around the string.
- Copy the file path–highlighted in green– into Windows Explorer and your file will open. Search for your term and you can see exactly how it was formatted.
It’s not a super-elegant method, but it works every time. And I will take plodding and reliable over elegant and inexact any day.
¹ “String” is a coding word, meaning a string of characters, like beads on a string. In English, you can think of this as a word or a phrase.
² Not only is Notepad++ free, I have been able to install it in even the most restrictive business environments.