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If I want to do a search & replace for tabs in a file (e.g. to replace them with 4 spaces), there's no easy way to enter the tabs in the "Find" field. Hitting tab changes focus to the "Replace" field. Instead I have to find an existing one in the file, copy it to the clipboard, then paste it into the field in the dialog. Newlines are even worse. Hitting Enter just performs the search/replace, and copying & pasting one into the field just gets taken as (and matched to) the space character. So, if I wanted to replace all occurences of >1 blank line with a single one, there's no way to do this using the Replace dialog. It would be nice if the usual \t & \n (and, for that matter, the other character escape sequences as well e.g. \uXXXX unicode characters) were interpreted as tabs, newlines, etc. when searching and replacing.
Changing subcomponent to "search"
There doesn't seem to be any workaround for the 'replace' box. Nothing entered in there will add a newline to the file
*** Issue 100407 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Some more comments in issue #100407. Seems there is a workaround for the editor, but none for file search.
*** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 112353 ***
Hmm... this bug is a "duplicate" of one that wasn't raised until 5 years later, as opposed to the other way round? Well, I suppose that's one way to reduce the "average outstanding issue age" statistics ;-)
Ah, I'm sorry. Generally the newer the report the more recent/up-to-date info, which is not to say that old reports are worthless of course. Also johnmuir in #112353 says he thinks it's rather defect than enhancement/feature request, so I duped the others to his report.