The Search dialog box is used to find strings within the current buffer.

The options available are:

Block search
This attribute controls the effect searches will have when a highlighted region exists in a file. When enabled searches and string translations will be restricted to the highlighted region. 

Case sensitive
This option controls whether alphabetic characters are to be compared literally or in a case insensitive fashion. When enabled, this means that the string “ABC” will not match the string “abc”. If disabled then the match will occur.  

Column search
This option enables the Starting col and Ending col fields. With this option enabled, you can restrict a search so that it only falls within the designated columns. You can get the starting and ending column fields to be setup automatically by highlighting the column before invoking the search dialog box. 

Regular expressions
This option enables or disables regular expression characters. This option is normally rarely disabled, but it can be useful when searching for strings which contain numerous regular expression characters. (Normally you can turn off the special meaning of regular expression characters by simply specifying a backslash before the character). 

Show all matching text
If this option is enabled then when a search is performed, all occurrences of the matching text will be highlighted on screen. This can be useful when looking at text, such as source code or data files, where you want to see the occurrences of the matching text, e.g. variable names.

You can temporarily turn on and off this option by using the set [no]showall Command: prompt command.

Unix syntax mode 
This option controls the style of regular expressions. The “Unix” option specifies a “vi” superset of regular expressions, including many of the features from the utilities: awk, egrep, grep, and sed. The CRiSP syntax is not widely used but may be useful to users coming from the MS-DOS world. 

Whole word only 
If this option is enabled then whenever you specify a word to be searched for, CRiSP will automatically add the start-word and end-word regular expression sequences to the pattern you have typed, thus only matching a full word. 

Wrap search
This option is used to control the effect of failed searches. On a forwards search, if the search fails to find a matching string before reaching the end of the buffer, and this option is enabled, then CRiSP will try and continue the search by wrapping around to the start of the buffer and searching the text before the current cursor position. (This is identical to the default behaviour for the vi editor). Likewise, for backwards searches – if the search fails searching backwards, then CRiSP will attempt to continue the search from the end of the buffer back to the current cursor position. 

You can temporarily turn on and off this option by using the set [no]wrapscan Command: prompt command.

Syntax mode
The syntax mode lets you choose the syntax for regular expressions. CRiSP supports three styles of regular expressions

BRIEF syntax mode 
BRIEF mode selects BRIEF compatible regular expressions and uses {..} to group expressions and asterisk means zero or more characters (rather than repeat the last expression), and @ is used to indicate zero or more of the last expression.

Perl syntax mode 
Perl syntax mode is similar to Unix syntax mode but includes the following differences: 
grouping is performed without the need to backslash (..) groups.
In replacement strings, $1..$9 are used to refer to the matched group rather than \1..\9.

Unix syntax mode 
The “Unix” option specifies a “vi” superset of regular expressions, including many of the features from the utilities: awk, egrep, grep, and sed. The CRiSP syntax is not widely used but may be useful to users coming from the MS-DOS world. 

Syntax searching
You can also search for words which are a specific part of the language syntax, e.g. you might only want to search for symbols which are part of actual code, and not embedded in comments. You can define the elements which are to be considered in your search by using the Syntax button. This will pop up a dialog where you can select or deselect the elements.