Frequently in large documents, do I use the ‘find and replace’ (command-F) feature in Scrivener to locate certain words in my document. However, recently I have found that the feature doesn’t work. In other words, when I go to search for word(s) it returns with nothing in the search results even for words that I know very well are existent in the document. Essentially, the command-F feature sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I don’t know if it’s an issue with my computer as sometimes when I search for things in my finder, it returns a null result even for things I know very well exist in my computer. I don’t know if these two problems are related or not, but I thought to shoot this out in case it wasn’t my computer that was at fault. Hope to hear from someone soon about the matter, as it is really irritating.
Do you have the comments pane open in the Inspector? There’s a bug that has crept in whereby the Find command doesn’t cycle back to the top of the text view when the comments pane is open (because it tries to search the comments area and beeps when it finds nothing rather than going back to the top of the text as it should). If you close the comments pane or put the caret at the start of the text, it should work - there are no other known bugs relating to Find. (And this one will be fixed in the next free update.)
I’ll bet that yosimiti hasn’t yet stumbled on the ‘Project Search’ command (Edit / Find / Project Search - Ctrl-Opt-F for short). The ‘Find’ (Cmd-F) command only seems to work on the currently visible document. This problem tripped me up for my first couple of weeks using Scrivener.
Must say, it does still seem inelegant that the identical operation is called ‘Find’ in document scope and ’Search’ in project scope, and has a special popup window in a document but uses the main screen’s search window (near the Inspector button) for a project. Maybe this difference is functional in some way I haven’t figured out yet.
Anyway, yosimiti: In most programs, e.g., Microsoft Word, Cmd-F and the search window do exactly the same thing, but in Scrivener they’re different. Try using Project Search or the search window and see if that helps.
This is generally how most Mac apps work - see Mail, for instance, where to search all your mail you use the toolbar search field, but to search an individual document you use the regular Find (Cmd-F) command.