Is there a way to search for all the lists in a project?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

The find-by-formatting offers the capability to search for various items in a doc, but I don’t see an option to search for lists:

image
image1244×908 78.9 KB

is there any way to find all the lists in every doc in the project (one at a time of course).

This is for Mac with Scrivener 3.5.2.

many thanks

2

There’s not a specific tool for this, but you can use the project search. MacOS lists (when you’re creating one via the Format ▸ List menu) follow the format “tab, bullet marker, tab”, so you could run a project search for that with the “Exact Phrase” operator to call up the documents that have text matching that pattern, using the bullet type you’re looking for. (In the case of ordered lists, I’d just match the first item, e.g. “1.” or “A)”, since all you’re doing with this is finding documents containing a list, not trying to match every item within the list. If you have lists that aren’t starting at one every time, you might want to adjust.)

If you have a couple of types of list, e.g. unordered bullet lists and numbered list with the “1. 2. 3.” style, you could expand the search by using the “Any Words” operator and entering each of the tab-marker-tab phrases in quotes, which make each of the phrases an exact match.

A more concise way to search for multiple list types would be via a RegEx pattern; that would also let you extend the match so the search highlighted all the list items even in an ordered list.

Examples:

  • Exact Phrase operator (for the square bullet type): ▪
  • Any Word operator (for bullet lists or “1. 2. 3.” style lists): " • ", " 1. "
  • RegEx operator (matching any default list characters): ^\t([•◦◆▪⁃✓]|([\d]+|[a-zA-Z]+)[\.\)])\t

Whichever you use, once you’ve run the search, you can click the magnifying glass in the search field and choose Save Search as Collection so it’s easy to re-run whenever you need it.

3 Likes
3

Do you have a similar list for the windows document to search. I suspect the bullet point styles are specific to Mac. the reg ex search did not work for windows. This is a great post and would love to use in the windows version if possible.

4

On Windows, the markers are not full citizens in the text. You will note you cannot select them or delete parts of the list. On the Mac you can, and that is how search tools can operate on the list markers themselves, they are actual text—that could also be “damaged” by search and replace (a fact that was great when I was migrating all of my lists to Markdown—which incidentally made them really easy to search for!).

I don’t know if there is a reliable way to find a list on Windows. If you try a regex search for ^\w for example, you’ll see that the first letter of each list line is highlighted. Everything before that point just isn’t there, in the sense you’d need it to be.

1 Like