Everything in your book, one search away

Full-text search across your manuscript reaches further than the page you're on: one query covers scene and chapter text, titles, synopses, notes, and every character, location, and plotline in your book. Toggle match-case or switch to a regular expression when a plain phrase isn't precise enough, and every result is a click away — search is read-only, so it can find things but never change them.

How does full-text search cover my manuscript?

Open the Search panel from the activity bar and type a query. It searches manuscript text, scene/chapter/part titles, scene and chapter synopses, note text, and your story entities (characters, locations, plotlines) — all at once, all in the active book. Results show each match with context; click one to jump straight to the scene or entity.

Search is scoped to the book you're working in, which is why the command is called "Find in book" — books in a project stay separate. To search only the editor tab you currently have open, use the sibling "Find in editor" command instead. Trashed items never show up in search or as a jump target, so results only ever reflect your live manuscript. A Recent searches dropdown keeps your last queries so you can step back through them without retyping.

Can I search with regex or match case?

Match case and Regex toggles sit right next to the query field, so you decide how literally the search matches. Match case is the difference between finding a name and finding every lowercase word that happens to share it; regex lets you search for a real pattern instead of one fixed phrase, useful once a manuscript is long enough that a plain-text guess stops being enough.

This is project search, not the in-editor find-and-replace you'd use to fix a typo across the scene you're currently writing — that's a separate, lighter command scoped to one open tab. Recent searches persist across sessions, so a regex you got right once doesn't need reconstructing from memory the next time you need it.

How do I find every mention of a character?

Right-click a character, location, or other entry in the Book Wiki and choose Find All Mentions. It searches the whole manuscript for that entry's name and aliases and opens the results in the Search panel, grouped by chapter, with a badge showing which entity you searched for.

A mention found this way is still just a candidate — a highlighted name, not a confirmed fact. It becomes an appearance only when you confirm it on the entity's card, one click at a time. "Appears in," first appearance, and last appearance are all built from those confirmed appearances, never from the raw text matches Find All Mentions surfaces. Keeping the two separate is deliberate: a character can be mentioned in passing without actually appearing in a scene, so nothing gets promoted for you.

How do I get back to where I was working?

Quick jump — the command field in the title bar — takes you straight to any scene, chapter, part, character, location, plotline, or note by typing its name, no browsing the manuscript structure tree by hand. Once you're deep in a long book, that alone cuts most of the navigating you'd otherwise do manually.

Recent items bring you back to whatever you just had open, and breadcrumbs show exactly where you are in the book's structure so you can step back up a level at a time. Bookmarks let you mark a specific spot and return to it later from the command palette — handy for a scene you'll want to revisit once you've written past it.

What are tags, and how do I filter my project by one?

A tag is a marker: a name and a color, always together — the only marker mechanism in Writer Studio, so the colors you see in the tree are tag colors, nothing separate. One project-wide namespace covers scenes, chapters, parts, characters, locations, plotlines, and notes, so a tag like "flashback" or "revenge thread" means the same thing wherever you put it.

Assign a tag from an item's right-click menu or its tags field in Properties. To use it as a filter, click the tag anywhere it appears — a chip on a card, a color in the tree, or the tag list in the Search panel — and you'll see everything carrying it, each one a jump away.

Search and navigation stay deterministic on purpose: nothing here rewrites your text or your Book Wiki, it just gets you to the right place faster. Read the full search and navigation documentation for every shortcut, or download Writer Studio — it's free — and see how much less time you spend hunting once your manuscript can find itself.