Vault-wide find and replace?

[marc_samida]

What I’m trying to do

I would like to know if it’s possible to “find and replace” text throughout a vault or if it’s only possible within individual notes.

Things I have tried

[anon63144152]

Not in the core. VS Code is great at opening vaults and completing small or massive search-and-replace runs throughout a whole vault.

[smiggles]

There is currently no core Obsidian ways to search and replace

You can see the feature request here,

Global (Mass / Vault-wise) search & replace

I used to use [[documentation]] for all of my notes on content that I was reading/watching. Now, I realize that #documentation would be much more appropriate. I’d like to search and replace, but have 200+ notes with [[documentation]] and there seems to be no bulk search & replace, only on a per-file basis.

The feature appears to be on the roadmap according to some insiders

Workarounds

Currently there are a couple work arounds!

Global Search and Replace Plugin

GitHub - MahmoudFawzyKhalil/obsidian-global-search-and-replace: A plugin to do...

This plugin is not available through the community plugin browser. You should behave with caution but, the plugin’s code looks safe and there aren’t any reported issues!

Linter Plugin

obsidian://show-plugin?id=obsidian-linter

The linter plugin formats and styles your notes based on custom settings!

You can perform a global replace using “Custom Regex Replacement”

Its important to read,

Patterns and flags

In order to understand regex replacement. However, you still need to use caution when using it. Regex isn’t a simple concept and its easy to mess up. In this case, it could wreck your entire vault

Make sure to backup your vault before continuing

After specifying the text you want to find and replace, you need to run “Linter: Lint all files in the vault”

Remember to remove the custom rule after running it (if this is a one time search and replace)

Find and Replace (findandreplace.io) (Windows 10/11)

Find & Replace Tool

Make sure to backup your vault before continuing

In addition, be cautious when using this application

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code - Code Editing. Redefined

You can use Visual Studio Code by opening your vault in VSC and using Ctrl + Shift + H

Open in VSCode plugin

obsidian://show-plugin?id=open-vscode

Using this plugin allows you to open your vault in Visual Studio Code in seconds

In addition, “You can use VSCode for various purposes with your vault, such as for git version control, markdown formatting with Prettier, linting with markdownlint, mass formatting files and more.” - NomarCub

Honorable Mentions

Tag Wrangler Plugin

obsidian://show-plugin?id=tag-wrangler

GitHub - pjeby/tag-wrangler: Rename, merge, toggle, and search tags from the...

grepWin (Windows10/11)

Global (Mass / Vault-wise) search & replace

I use the tool “grepWin” in Windows (10) Explorer for such purposes. Right click on the note-folder, search and replace - done! I have backups of all my notes, so there’s no worry. Works also with YAML Metadata. https://tools.stefankueng.com/grepWin.html

MacOS Shell Script

Global (Mass / Vault-wise) search & replace

I use a shell script for this bulk replacement on MacOS: #!/bin/sh ORIG='text_to_be_replaced' REPL='new_text' find . -name '*.md' | xargs -r sed -i '' "s/$ORIG/$REPL/g"

Global (Mass / Vault-wise) search & replace

Based on my understanding, the . means current folder where the shell script is executed. And you can replace it with some other path. Second, find will go through all subdirectories recursively by default. And if you want don’t want find to go into the subdirectory, you can use -maxdepth to limit the maximum depth that find will go. find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.md' | xargs -r sed -i '' "s/$ORIG/$REPL/g"

Atom.io ( Deprecated )

Find and replace links across all files in a vault

After adjusting my graph-view to only bubble up heavily backlinked nodes, I’ve noticed that some nodes are large even though they’re not very important. Those are one-word notes (e.g. “deep work” or “job” or “ideas”) that I linked up because it was so easy[^1]. At this point, I care more about the quality of connections and decided to remove this type of noise from my vault. After testing a few ways to “Find and replace” recursively across files and folders, and failing hard[^2], here’s what’…

Best of luck! Have a great day

[I-d-as]

Another semi related tool is the PowerRename utility for Windows. It can be helpful when used in conjunction with a vault wide search and replace. The ability to use regex to rename a bunch of files programmatically is very helpful. And then you can use VSCode or similar to properly update all the links to those notes. Here’s a relevant feature request: Bulk rename notes updating links

Thanks!