How to Find and Replace Text with Regular Expressions in VS Code

VS Code has a full regular expression engine built into its Find and Replace control. You can search for patterns instead of exact text, capture parts of matches, and rearrange them in the replacement.

Regex is useful whenever find and replace is too repetitive to do by hand: swapping the order of function arguments, changing date formats, wrapping values in quotes, or removing debug logging from a whole file.

Open find and replace

Press Ctrl+F (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+F (macOS) to open the Find control at the top right of the editor.

Press Ctrl+H (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Opt+F (macOS) to open it with the Replace field already visible.

The Find control has toggle buttons for Match Case, Match Whole Word, and regular expressions. Click the .* icon or press Alt+R to enable regex mode. A checkmark appears on the icon when regex is active.

As you type a regex pattern, matches are highlighted in the editor. Press Enter to jump to the next match. Press Shift+Enter to go to the previous one.

Your first regex replace

Open any file and enable regex mode. Type this pattern in the Find field and this replacement in the Replace field:

text

Find:    (\w+)\s*=\s*(\w+)
Replace: $2 = $1

Press Ctrl+Alt+Enter to replace all, or press Enter to preview each match individually.

This pattern finds assignments like width = 100 and swaps them to 100 = width. The parentheses create capture groups: $1 is the first group (before the =), and $2 is the second (after the =).

Capture groups and backreferences

Enclose parts of your pattern in parentheses to capture them. Reference captured text in the replacement with $1, $2, and so on. $0 refers to the entire match.

To insert a literal $ character in the replacement, type two dollar signs together: $$.

Change case in replacements

VS Code supports case modifiers that transform captured text during replacement:

These can be stacked. \u\U$1 uppercases the first character and the rest, turning hello world into HELLO WORLD.

Practical example: to convert snake_case identifiers to PascalCase, find _(\w) (a single character after an underscore) and replace with \U$1 (the captured character uppercased).

Find and replace in a selection

Select the lines you want to search within. Press Alt+L (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Opt+L (macOS), or click the Find in Selection icon (three lines with a magnifying glass) in the Find control.

Only matches inside the selection are found and highlighted. The rest of the file is ignored. This is useful when you want to rename variables inside one function without touching the rest of the file.

To make Find in Selection the default behavior, set editor.find.autoFindInSelection to always in your settings.

Multiline search

Press Ctrl+Enter inside the Find or Replace input box to insert a newline. This lets you search for patterns that span multiple lines.

For example, to find a function definition followed by its opening brace, with regex enabled:

text

Find:    function (\w+)\(
Replace: export function $1(

This adds export to function declarations without touching function calls.

Drag the left edge of the Find control to resize it if the multiline text is hard to read.

Useful regex patterns

Replace across files

The same regex engine works in cross-file search. Press Ctrl+Shift+F (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Shift+F (macOS) to open the Search view.

Type your regex pattern in the search box. Click the .* toggle to enable regex. Click the arrow next to the search box to show the Replace field. You see a diff preview of changes before applying them across all files.

Troubleshooting

To review pending replacements safely, use the Replace button (not Replace All) to step through each match. Undo with Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z) if a replacement does not produce what you expected. For more on VS Code search features, see the keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet. If you need to make the same edit across many locations, the multiple cursors guide shows another approach.