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ok, excuses for my lack of documentation aside, basically CAD Replace works like you would expect any find – replace thingy in any app. Well, that was my intention, please let me know if it doesn’t. No, really – your feedback will really help.

If your cursor is in the find field you an just type your text and hit enter to find it. Alt-A replaces everything.

If you have selected things in the drawing it will only search in those objects, if nothing is selected then it will search everything it can. The same goes for the list in the palette of the things it found, if you select any you will see some buttons at the bottom of the list – they only act on the things you have selected. You can select multiple things with the usual Shift and Control Key plus clicks.

Tick the boxes in the Search Settings to choose what kind of objects to search in. 

If you tap the ALT key you will see a letter in each command is underlined – these are the alt-key shortcuts for each command or button. e.g. Alt-A is Replace All. You probably need to click on one of the settings first to focus CAD replace’s attention on it, then the Alt- shortcuts should be underlined.

Replacing Attribute Tags in blocks is kinda tricky so make sure you save your work before the first time you attempt it. Still…Control-Z works! Hot tip: if you’re editing a block in-place and you copy-paste some Attributes and want to change their tags, effectively adding new attributes to the block, make sure you untick the Sync Block Definition Attribs – yeah, everything turns scary-red but it’s ok, this time. If you actually want to change Tags, make sure the right boxes are ticked (don’t forget Inside Block Definitions) and all the scary-red goes away.

If you know what  Regular Expressions are then you’re in luck, tick the box. If you are relatively normally socially adjusted then you’ve probably never heard of them – untick that box, there be dragons in there. If you’re curious (I tried to warn you) then keep an eye on the Messages and Warnings area when you use wildcards – you will see the Regular Expression translations there. You will see them in the logs too. What logs? Have a look in the About tab.

The wildcard options are individually selectable and work the  same way as the do in AutoCAD, which is to say they confuse me more than Regular Expressions but not as much as Autodesk’s website.

Some of the settings are greyed-out, you can’t change them. That’s because I haven’t finished them yet – if you really want it, bug me about it. You never know, that might work, don’t let my kids’ testimony deter you from trying that.