After using Prepare to Search or pressing Ctrl+F and entering a search term, click the Previous button on the Search toolbar or select the Find Previous item in the Search menu to find the previous search match. Find Previous starts searching from the current position of the text cursor in the current file. If the “selection only“ option is on, Find Previous searches until the start of the search range. If “all files“ is on, Find Previous searches until the start of the file and then continues at the end of the previous file until a search match is found. If “all projects“ is on, and Find Previous reaches the first file in the current project, Find Previous will continue with the previous project.
If the search term can be found, EditPad switches to the file it was found in, and selects the matched text. If the search term cannot be found, nothing happens. Only the Find Previous button will briefly flash its icon to indicate it failed.
The Find Previous command is not available in regular expression mode unless you also turn on the line by line mode. Regular expressions cannot search backwards. But EditPad can iterate over the lines in your file from bottom to top and apply the regex from left to right on each line to find the previous line in which the regex can find a match.
In EditPad Pro, the Find Previous button on the search toolbar has a drop-down menu. The first item in the drop-down menu is Find in Previous File. When you select this item, EditPad starts searching from the end of the previous file. You can use Find in Previous File even when the “all files“ option is off. If the search term cannot be found in the previous file, and one or more of the “all files“, “all projects“ and “loop automatically“ options are on, Find in Previous File continues the search just like the Find Previous command itself.
The drop-down menu also has three items that you can use to find a specific search match, counting search matches from the start. The Find 10th Previous item skips over the previous 9 search matches and highlights the 10th. The result is the same as if you had clicked the Find Previous button 10 times. If there are no 10 preceding search matches, the result is slightly different. Find 10th Previous then does not do anything other than flashing the Previous button to indicate failure. Similarly, the Find 100th Previous item skips the previous 99 search matches and selects match #100.
The Find Previous Nth item asks you for the number of the match you want to find. If you enter 42, for example, EditPad skips the 41 preceding search matches and highlights the 42nd.