MetaEdit+ provides a built-in text editor for editing long text property values. The Text Editor includes basic text processing functions in the Edit menu and in the pop-up menu of the editing area. These functions include find, replace, cut, copy and paste and undo. Shortcut keys are provided for the most frequently used functions, and for setting fonts. Furthermore, you can save and retrieve text in the editor from external files and print the text through the functions in the File menu.

You may also use an external text editor program, configurable on the Paths page of the Options Tool (see Paths settings in Section 3.1.3 for details).

A selected block can be indented or unindented with Tab or Shift+Tab. Other shortcut keys for editing include the following, which also work in other text fields in MetaEdit+:

Shortcut keys for setting fonts include:

Choosing Find... from a menu (often Ctrl+F) will open a Find dialog (Figure 3–44).

At the top is an input field for a search string, combined with a combobox remembering previously entered search strings. Below that are checkbox options for how to match the search string in the text. For Wildcards, # indicates a single character and * zero or more characters. Regex allows using Regular Expressions: see Appendix 1 in the ‘MetaEdit+ Workbench User’s Guide’ for details.

The Find Dialog stays open after as long as you do not close it with the Cancel button. You can thus continue finding occurrences of the search string, while the dialog stays open and the underlying editor tracks the selection according to the current match.

The dialog automatically looks ahead for the next and the previous match, and enables the Find Next and Find Previous buttons accordingly. This gives immediate feedback whether it is useful to request a next or previous search.

After the dialog has closed, in most text widgets you can use Ctrl+G and Ctrl+Shift+G to continue the same search to the next or previous matches.

The Find dialog is also available from the Shift popup menu in many list, tree and table widgets: see ‘List dialogs and keyboard search’ above the Contents.