Find and Replace – a Firefox Addon So Useful for Online Text Editing
Find and Replace for Text Editing (or simply Find and Replace) is a Firefox addon to do what its name says by Blake Altice (originally written by Dalimil Hajek). It has capabilities to find text based on regular expression (regex) as well as simple plain text. It also has other features such as Favorites, History, Templates and Help coming as a full package. Now we want to explore it with examples we found to do simple text replacements. Enjoy!
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Usage Examples
We found that Find and Replace works in these examples:
Web email editing: This includes your webmail Gmail, Yahoo!, Mailo, Protonmail etc.
Wikipedia editing: This includes Wikipedia as well as other wiki websites.
WordPress editing: This includes WordPress but excludes Blogspot.
GitHub and Comments editing: This includes many plain-text comment editors available on almost all websites nowadays including Issues in code forge websites such as Codeberg, Launchpad, GitLab alike.
Pastebin and online text editors: this includes Pastebin alike as well as other web-based text editors such as Online Pad.
Etherpad and collaborative text editors: this includes Etherpad (with some notes below) and alike.
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How To Install Find and Replace
On Ubuntu version 24.04 with Mozilla Firefox version 142 and addon version 1.3.18:
1. Go to Mozilla Addons Org website.
2. Search for "find and replace".
3. Select and install Find and Replace by Blake Altice.
If you don't have an idea on these, please refer to our tutorial on installing a Firefox addon.
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How To Find and Replace Some Text (Wikipedia)
The best way to know Find and Replace features is to try it out editing a Wikipedia page without saving it. We picked here Debian page. The goal is to replace the phrase "Linux distribution" to "GNU/Linux distribution".
1. Visit https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian.
2. Click Edit.
3. Click within the text editor.
4. Click Find and Replace logo or press Ctrl+Shift+F to show its user interface.
5. Type "Linux distribution" in the first text box to find all matches (will be colored in orange and blue).
6. Type "GNU/Linux distribution" in the second one.
7. Click Replace All to replace them all at once, or, click Replace to replace them one by one. Done.
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Web email example
We picked Mailo Web Email here and copied Debian 13 "Trixie" release announcement [1] as the text to replace. No extra tricks needed. It works.
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WordPress example
We can confirm that Find and Replace works on both Classic and the modern Block Editors. We used Debian Trixie announcement [1] again here. (Note: unfortunately, we can also confirm that it doesn't work with Blogspot at all). It works!
Comments example
We picked WordPress Comments section here. It works like in the post editor. It works!
Online text editor example
We have tried text editors based on TinyMCE (the one everyone knows as WordPress Classic Editor) as well as others which are simple enough to edit plain text (meaning, less JavaScript). We used Debian Trixie announcement [1] again here. It works with TinyMCE!
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Pastebin example
We tried out Pastebin and it is a success for Find and Replace. We used Debian Trixie announcement [1] again here. It works.
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Etherpad example
It almost does not work on Etherpad until we found a little "trick" to make it work. It might be not comfortable for most users.
The trick is:
1. Do the steps above until step number 5.
2. Watch the matching colors appearing, they will quickly disappear.
3. Click either one of buttons under two input boxes (e.g. Match Case or Advanced Options).
4. Click Replace or Replace All as long as all matching colors are still appearing.
5. Do steps number 3 and 4 quickly, otherwise one or some matches will not be replaced. Done.
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GitHub example
We picked GitHub here as an example and this should also works on other web code forges Launchpad, GitLab, Codeberg (Forgejo), Sourceforge etc. What is this? This is the place where people come to develop software together and people who found an issue report that issue to the developers.
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Forum example
We picked Ubuntu Forum (discourse.ubuntu.com) here to test it out. It works.
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Caveats
1. We can confirm that it does not work with Blogspot.
2. It does not work on W3Schools text editor.
3. It does not work on Hedgedoc markdown editor (formerly CodiMD).
4. It does not work on CryptPad text editor as well as its OnlyOffice.
We hope next versions of Find and Replace will fix these issues. Thank you Blake Altice and Dalimil Hajek.
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See Also
1. Find and Replace with Formatting on LibreOffice Writer.
2. A Comprehensive Guides to Learn Ubuntu from the Basics.
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About Find and Replace
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References
1. Debian 13 GNU/Linux "Trixie" Release Announcement.
2. Find and Replace Dissertation University of Edinburgh 2018 by the original developer. [PDF]
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This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Source: Ubuntu Buzz !