I've read the several issue reports on the inability of Writer to search for
paragaph breaks (you can search for a single paragraph break using $, but not
multiple paragraph breaks using $$$ etc., unless I've missed something - please
tell me if I have!)

Searching for multiple paragraph breaks has always been a critical feature for
me as a specialist in documentation work. It allows you to do all kinds of
useful document formatting, especially replacing multiple breaks with single
breaks, and in other ways cleaning up text.

As far as I can tell there is just no way in Writer to, say, search for all
triple paragraph breaks and replace them with single breaks, nor can you search
for something like a space followed by a paragraph break, find the combination,
and replace both with, say, a manual break (Writer would just replace the space,
not the combination). I want to add my voice to those who say flexibly searching
and replacing paragraph breaks is very important.

Also this is an opportunity to one-up WORD. WORD allows you to search for
paragraph returns, but NOT in WORD's "wildcard" (sort of regular expressions)
search mode. So you have to switch back and forth between plain text searching
and wildcard searching to search for both paragraph breaks and manual returns, c
creating some odd work arounds. To be able to effectively search for both
paragraph breaks and manual returns in regular expression mode would give Writer
a significant features lacking in WORD.

Thanks for your attention!

Rob Weinberg