Search and pickers

yumete has four ways to find things, from small to large:

Searches can treat simplified and traditional characters as one (書 finds 书), and full pinyin can find the characters it spells (shuzhai finds 書齋). Where each is on is under Chinese in a search.

Searching in the file: /

/ opens a search: prompt at the bottom of the screen. You can type Chinese there with the input method. Enter jumps to the first match after the cursor, and the match becomes the selection, so c right after a search changes the word you found.

The pattern is a regular expression. /第.+章 finds every chapter heading. To find a character that means something in a regex, such as . * ( or [, escape it with \.

The last pattern you searched for waits on an empty prompt in grey. Enter on its own searches for it again, and Tab turns it into text you can edit. C-p and C-n (or Up and Down) walk your search history.

Case

A pattern with no capital letters ignores case; one capital makes case count. This is the same smart case helix uses. Since Chinese has no case, most searches never notice. To turn it around once, start the pattern with (?-i). To turn it off for good:

[editor]
smart_case = false

Searching for the word you are on

g/ takes the selection, or the word under the cursor, and jumps to the next place it appears. The text is taken as it stands, so brackets and dots need no escaping. g? shows the same match in the other editor region, so the place you are standing stays on screen (see Windows and the sidebar).

Under the helix keymap, * works as in helix: it puts the selection into the search register without moving, with word boundaries when the selection is a whole word (A-* without them). Press n to go.

Chinese in a search

Two kinds of matching are added on top of the plain text. Each can be on or off on its own.

Glyphs (繁簡). A character also matches its other written forms: simplified, traditional, and the regional variants. 書齋 finds 书斋, and 书斋 finds 書齋. The rule is one-sided on purpose: a vague character finds more, a precise one stays precise. 发 stands for both 發 and 髮, so it finds both; 發 does not find 髮.

Glyph folding works inside a regex too. Only the characters you typed plainly are folded, so 書.*齋 still means "書, anything, 齋". One thing to watch: inside a negated class it excludes more than you typed. [^書] also refuses 书. Turn glyph matching off when you need the exact class.

Pinyin. A run of Latin letters also finds the characters it spells. shuzhai finds 書齋 and 书斋. Every syllable must be spelled in full: sz and shuzh find nothing. Every reading of a character counts, so both chang and zhang find 長. Letters and characters can be mixed: zhongguo很大, zhong国 and 中guo all find 中國很大. The plain-text match still runs, so hello keeps finding hello.

Where each kind is used:

On the / prompt, A-j turns both on together, and the prompt changes from search: to wide search: so you can see which you have. It stays as you left it. It starts off because English text is full of short words like de, shi and an, and every one of them is also a syllable.

The search panel: Space /

Space / opens the search panel in the left sidebar. Where / gives you one match at a time, the panel lists all of them, across as many files as you ask for.

╔Search══════════════════1/2═╗
║  Search: shuzhai           ║
║1 case [smart]              ║
║2 Chinese [glyphs+pinyin]   ║
║3 matching [literal]        ║
║4 whole word [ ]            ║
║5 replace [off]             ║
║6 In: this file             ║
╠════════════════════════════╣
║3  他走進書齋，看見桌上的書…║
║5  书斋裏很安靜。           ║
╚Tab Explorer>Buffers>Outlin…╝

The panel opens with the keys in the search box. A selection longer than one character is searched for at once; otherwise your last search waits in grey, and Enter runs it again. In "this file" the list updates as you type. The wider scopes wait for Enter, since reading a hundred files per keystroke would be too slow; the top right corner says Enter to search until then.

Keys in the panel

While you type in a box:

Out of the box:

j on a result shows that match in the text while the keys stay in the panel. Enter goes there and hands the keys to the text. Once you edit the text the list is out of date, and Enter searches again before it jumps.

The switches

Each row is a number, a name and the state it is in now. Press the number to step to the next state.

Matching is literal by default: in ordinary text you look for (注) or A.B more often than for a pattern. "Whole word" only works on Latin words; Chinese has no word boundaries, so with it on a Chinese search finds nothing. The switches last until you quit; [editor] fuzzy_search = true starts on fuzzy.

Fuzzy matching

Fuzzy finds the characters you typed, in order and close together: 他説 finds 他輕輕地説. The whole match must fit in twice the number of characters you typed, plus four, or nearly every long line of text would match. This is not the file picker's fuzzy matching, which ranks short names and ignores case.

Fuzzy is for finding only. Turning replace on sets matching back to literal, and while replace is on, 3 steps between literal and regex.

Scopes

The 6 row says where to look. Press 6 (or h / l while standing on it) to step around:

The commands take where to look, never what to find: :search 稿 searches the folder 稿. A relative path counts from the working directory. An open file is searched in its buffer, so unsaved changes are found. The scope does not follow the cursor into another repository; :cd there first.

Which files: only, except, skip

Scopes that read from disk add three more rows.

"only" and "except" take comma-separated globs, written as in .gitignore. "Hidden" is dot-files; "ignored" is what .gitignore and .ignore name. A search that comes back short is usually missing an ignored folder, and the first press of 7 lets those in. Binary files are never searched, and a very long search stops after five seconds; the count then ends in +.

Replacing across files

:replace (:r) opens the same panel with a "replace with" box below the search box. :replace-buffers (:rb), :replace-working (:rw), :replace-project (:rp) and :replace <folder> choose the scope, as the search commands do. You can also press 5 in an open panel.

On the results:

Standing on a match, a preview under the list shows the line after the change, with what goes out struck through and what comes in in green.

Nothing is written to disk. Each file with a match is changed in a buffer, and :wa saves them all. u in the panel takes the whole run back, except in a file you have typed in since, which it leaves alone and names.

keep case (the third state of 5) follows the case of what it replaces: server → daemon turns SERVER_DEBUG into DAEMON_DEBUG. Capture groups such as $1 work only with matching set to regex. A replacement that would change the number of cells in a table row is refused; :replace! does it anyway.

Substitute: :s

For a quick change in this file, vi's substitute is there. :s/find/replace/ changes the lines the selection covers; :%s changes the whole file. With a slash, :s is substitute; without one, it opens the search panel.

A range goes before s: :1-40s is lines 1 to 40, :1,5,9s is those three lines only, and :.-$s is this line to the end. Note that , lists single lines here, so :1,40s is two lines, not forty.

The separator is whatever follows s, so :s#2024/01#2025/02# needs no escaping. In the replacement, $1 is the first capture group, \n a newline and $$ a dollar sign. However many matches a substitution changes, one u undoes all of it.

Pickers

A picker opens in the middle of the screen, with a list on the left and a preview on the right. You type straight away to narrow the list.

:open with no file name opens the file picker too.

The file picker matches loosely: the letters you type must appear in order, so ch63 finds 卷三/ch63.md. It reads pinyin too, and digits and characters mix: di120 finds 第120章.md. The matched characters are drawn in gold. Before you type, files you opened this session come first, then the rest in path order. A file that is already open is previewed from its buffer.

Space e shows one folder at a time, folders first, with ../ at the top. Enter on a folder opens it in the same picker; Enter on a file opens the file. The preview shows what a folder holds.

From the shell: ye --grep

The search panel can be asked from the command line, without opening the editor. Pinyin and 繁簡 are on, which grep and rg cannot do.

$ ye --grep shuzhai
ch1.md
3:4:他走進書齋，看見桌上的書。

ch2.md
3:1:书斋裏很安靜。

On a terminal, hits are grouped under their file, as rg prints them. In a pipe each hit is one line, file:line:column:text, so awk and xargs can read it. --heading and --no-heading choose one. The text is sixty characters either side of the match, since a line of text can be a whole paragraph. The exit code is 0 if anything was found, 1 if nothing was, and 2 if the pattern was wrong.

ye --files finds file names the way Space f does:

$ ye --files di120
卷一/第120章.md

Both search the current directory. Name a directory or a file to search that instead, or pass --project to search from the project root.

--open (-O) opens the editor on the answer instead of printing it: --grep with the panel already run, --files with the picker already filtered. -G is short for --grep, and short names string together:

$ ye -GO zhongguo

The search word is always its own argument (-G zhongguo, not -Gzhongguo).

The other switches carry rg's names: --ignore-case, --case-sensitive, --word, --regex, --fixed (the default), --fuzzy, --hidden (-.), --no-ignore (-u; -uu adds the dot-files), --glob=, --exclude= and --color=, plus --chinese=both|glyphs|pinyin|off. --files takes only --hidden, --no-ignore, --glob=, --exclude= and --project. ye --help lists everything.