Searching in Content

To perform a search through the content of your resources, open the Open/Find Resource dialog box (from the Find menu or with Ctrl + Shift + R (Command + Shift + R on OS X)) or the Open/Find Resource view (by default, located on the left side of the editor), select the in content option, and in the search field enter the terms that you want to search for.

The Open/Find Resource feature is powered by Apache Lucene. Apache Lucene is a free open source information retrieval software library.

You can use the Open/Find Resource feature to either perform a simple text search or a more complex search using the Apache Lucene - Query Parser Syntax. Using the Apache Lucene - Query Parser Syntax means you can perform any of the following searches:

Term Searches

Use the Open/Find Resource view or dialog box to search for plain text:
Garden Preparation

Element-Specific Searches

Use the Open/Find Resource view or dialog box to search for content that belongs to a specific element:
title:"Garden Preparation"

Wildcard Searches

Use wildcards to make your search more permissive:
Garden Prepar?tion

Fuzzy Searches

If you are not sure of the exact form of a term that you are interested in, use the fuzzy search to find the terms that are similar to what you introduce in the Open/Find Resource view or dialog box. To perform a fuzzy search, use the ~ symbol after the word that you are not sure of:
Garden Preparing~

Proximity Searches

Use proximity searches to find words that are within a specific distance away. To perform a proximity search, use the ~ symbol at the end of your search. For example, to search for the word Garden and the word Preparation within 6 words of each other use:
"Garden Preparation"~6

Range Searches

Use range searches to match documents whose element values are between the lower and upper bound specified in the range query. For example, to find all documents whose titles are between Iris and Lilac, use:

title:{Iris TO Lilac}
The curly brackets denote an exclusive query. The results you get when using this query are all the documents whose titles are between Iris and Lilac, but not including Iris and Lilac. To create an inclusive query use square brackets:
title:[Iris to Lilac]

Term Prioritising Searches

Use term prioritising searches if the fragment of text that you are searching for contains certain words that are more important to your search than the rest of them. For example, if you are searching for Autumn Flowers, a good idea is to prioritise the word Autumn since the word Flowers occurs more often. To prioritise a word use the ^ symbol:
Autumn^6 Flowers

Searches Using Boolean Operators

You can use the AND, +, OR, -, and NOT operators.

To search for documents that contain both the words Garden and Preparation, use:
Garden AND Preparation
To search for documents that must contain the word Garden and may contain the word Preparation, use:
+Garden Preparation
To search for documents that contain either the word Garden or the word Preparation, use:
Garden OR Preparation
To search for documents that contain Garden Preparation but not Preparation of the Flowers, use:
"Garden Preparation" - "Preparation of the Flowers"

Searches Using Grouping

To search either for the word Garden or Preparation, and the word Flowers, use:
(Garden OR Preparation) AND Flowers

Searches Using Element Grouping

To search for a title that contains both the word Flowers and the phrase Garden Preparation, use:
title:(+Flowers +"Garden Preparation")

Searching for Special Characters

Sometimes you might need to search your content for special character, such as:
+ - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ ~ * ? : \
In this case, you should surround your search query with quotes. For example, to search for (Hydrogen + Oxygen)=Water, use:
"(Hydrogen + Oxygen)=Water"