How to use SuperFind

SuperFind adds a proper find and replace to Adobe Illustrator — the one the application never shipped with. This page covers everything the panel does, from a single search to batch runs and saved presets.

1. Overview

SuperFind is a non-modal panel: it stays open beside your artboard while you work, and you can keep using Illustrator with it on screen. Open it from Window > Extensions > SuperFind. If it was open when you last quit, it reopens by itself the next time you launch Illustrator.

With it you can:

• search for text using plain strings or regular expressions, with case-sensitive and whole-word options;
• search and rename layer, object and artboard names, not just the contents of text frames;
• restrict the search to the current document, every open document, the active artboard, the active layer, or your selection;
• review results in context, tick them individually, and replace only the ones you chose;
• run sequences of replacements in one click with the Batch tab, including a dry run and a per-row report;
• save and reload complete presets, with seven built in for typographic cleanup;
• keep character formatting intact through every replacement.

2. Requirements

• Adobe Illustrator CC 2020 (24.0) or later, on macOS or Windows.
• An internet connection to activate and check your license. Nothing else in the plugin uses the network — searching and replacing work entirely offline.

For how to get SuperFind onto your machine, see the installation page.

3. The panel

The panel has a header with a ⚙ settings button and three tabs: Find & Replace, Batch and Presets.

• Switching tabs never loses your work: what you typed in one tab is still there when you come back.
• Temporary menus — the ¶ special-characters menu, the Scope dropdowns, the Manage presets dialog — all close the same three ways: click outside, press Esc, or switch tab. Only one can be open at a time; opening one closes the other.
• The Settings panel is the exception: it opens and closes from the ⚙ button only, though it does close if you open one of the menus above.
• Scope dropdowns work from the keyboard: ↑ ↓ (which change the value directly while the menu is closed), Enter, Space, Esc, Home and End.
• The panel is dark by default. You can switch to the light theme in Settings, and your choice is remembered.

4. Find & Replace

The main mode: one search/replace pair, a preview of every match, and replacement only where you want it.

The Find and Replace fields

Type what you are looking for in Find and press Enter to search. Replace holds the replacement text; in Regex mode it accepts capture groups ($1, $2, and so on). The ¶ button opens the special-characters menu described in section 7.

Both fields understand escape sequences — \r, \n, \t, a non-breaking space, an en dash and an em dash — and turn them into real characters before searching.

Scope: where to look

Match: how to compare

With Regex off you do not have to escape anything: every special character is taken literally, so you find exactly what you typed.

Target: what to look in

Targets are chips, and you can switch on more than one at a time. Text (the contents of text frames) is on by default; Layer, Objects and Artboard search the corresponding names — layers and objects recursively, at any depth. At least one target has to be active, or the panel tells you to Select at least one search target.

One filter sits alongside them: 🔒 Include locked/hidden, off by default, brings in text frames that live on locked or hidden layers. It only affects the Text target — layer, object and artboard names are always included.

Actions

After any replacement the search runs again by itself and the list refreshes, so you immediately see whatever is left.

The status line

Underneath the buttons you get plain messages: Searching…, 12 results found, 3 replacements, No results found, or a specific error such as Enter a search term, Invalid regular expression or No document open. If a single frame goes over the match limit, the status line says so.

Reading the results

• The Results card opens on its own after each search, with a badge showing the count.
• A progress bar and an N selected label track how many entries are ticked. The All checkbox selects or clears everything, and shows a mixed state when only some are ticked.
• Every result has its own checkbox, ticked by default.
• Text results show 35 characters of context either side with the match highlighted, and underneath the trail artboard › layer · frame type (Point Type, Area Type or Type on Path).
• Name results show an icon for the kind of object and a preview of current name → new name.
• Clicking a text result brings the right document forward, selects that text frame and zooms the view to it.
• Searching across all open documents adds a header per document so you always know which file you are looking at.
• If several matches live in the same frame, that frame is still only rewritten once.

5. Batch

The Batch tab runs several find/replace pairs one after another, in one click. It is what you want for repeated typographic cleanups — quotes, double spaces, dashes — and for presets with more than one step.

The rows

Each row has a number and a drag handle, a Find and a Replace field (same escape sequences as the main tab), its own Scope dropdown, a per-row Regex checkbox with its own ¶ button, and an × to delete it.

• The table starts with three empty rows; + Add row adds another at the bottom.
• Drag a row by its handle to reorder it — an indicator shows where it will land. The order is the order they run in.
• Batch rows always search text only: not names, with no case-sensitive or whole-word option, and never on locked or hidden layers.

Running a batch

One caveat on the dry run: each row is counted against the document as it is right now. If a row depends on what an earlier row does, the real number can come out different when you actually run it.

The report

You get a line per row — Row 3: 12 replacements — with rows that found nothing marked differently, and a grand total at the bottom. A row with an invalid regular expression does not stop the others: it is flagged with a warning and the batch carries on.

6. Presets

A preset is a complete snapshot of how you had the panel set up: the fields and options of the Find & Replace tab and the whole Batch table, including each row's scope. They are ordinary files on disk, so you can back them up or pass them to someone else.

Saved presets

Each preset in the list shows its name, with a default label if it is one of the built-in ones, and two buttons. Load applies it — replacing, not merging, what is currently in the fields — and rebuilds the Batch table; it does not switch tabs, and confirms with Loaded ✓ for a moment. If the preset has no batch rows, the table goes back to three empty ones. Hide takes a preset out of the main list without deleting it; you can bring it back from Manage presets. Built-in presets are listed first, then the rest alphabetically.

Saving your own

+ Save current asks for a name and saves everything as it stands. Saving under a name that already exists overwrites it — that is how you update a preset.

Manage presets

This dialog lists every preset, hidden ones included. A Visible checkbox controls whether each one shows in the main list, and × deletes your own presets (the built-in ones cannot be deleted individually). Reset defaults, after a confirmation, removes every preset file — yours included — and rewrites the seven built-in ones from scratch, clearing the hidden list too.

The seven built-in presets

All seven are scoped to the current document, target text only, with no case-sensitivity and no locked layers.

7. Special characters

The ¶ button — in the Find & Replace tab and on every Batch row — opens a short menu that inserts a character at the cursor in whichever field you last had focus in. It offers a paragraph return, a forced line break, a tab, a non-breaking space, an en dash and an em dash.

The same menu carries a quick preset, Double space → single space, which fills in the current Find/Replace pair for you. Press the same ¶ again to close the menu.

8. What gets searched, and where

SuperFind searches all three kinds of Illustrator text — Point Type, Area Type and Type on Path — at any depth, including text inside nested groups.

Scope and target interact, and the table below is the exact rule:

Put simply: Active layer and Current selection narrow down the text, but names are still looked up across the whole document. Current artboard is the one scope that also narrows object and artboard names. All open documents widens every target to every open file.

One thing worth knowing about the locked and hidden filter: it looks at the layer a frame sits on, not at the individual object.

9. Formatting is preserved

Replacing text in Illustrator usually costs you the formatting. SuperFind captures the attributes of every single character before it touches anything, and puts them back afterwards, character by character — even when the replacement is a different length from what it replaced. Characters that are newly inserted inherit the formatting of the first character of the match they replaced.

What survives a replacement:

• font and size;
• fill colour, stroke colour, stroke weight and whether the stroke is on;
• tracking, baseline shift, horizontal and vertical scale;
• capitalisation, underline and strikethrough;
• rotation, language and kerning method.

If a replacement would produce exactly the text that is already there, the frame is left untouched — though the matches are still counted.

10. Undo, warnings and safety

• Undo works the way you expect. During Replace all and Run all, everything done to a given document is grouped into a single undo step, so one Cmd/Ctrl+Z takes back the whole operation, per document. Whichever document you were on is brought back to the front afterwards.
• No Illustrator dialogs interrupt a replacement halfway through; normal alerts come straight back once it is finished.
• An invalid regular expression is reported immediately, before any document is touched — never as a silent "0 results". In a batch, the error stays contained to its own row.
• Patterns that can match nothing (a* and friends) are handled without the plugin spinning forever.
• Results refer to real objects. If the document has moved on since your last search, clicking a result asks you to search again rather than acting on something stale.
• The only network calls the plugin ever makes go to the licensing service. The contents of your files never leave your computer.
• Text pulled out of your documents is always shown as plain text, never interpreted, so nothing inside a file can affect the panel itself.

11. License and free trial

Everything to do with your license lives in the Settings panel, behind the ⚙ button. A badge there tells you where you stand: Checking…, Not activated, Trial, Active, Expired, Offline, Mismatch or Unavailable.

The free trial

The trial runs for 5 days and starts with a free checkout — no payment details, only an email address, which is where your trial key is sent. You activate that key in the panel exactly like a paid one. While it is running, the panel shows how much time is left, switching from days to hours in the final stretch.

Activating and moving between computers

Paste your key into the field and press Activate. Once it is active the key is shown masked, and Deactivate releases it — which is also what you use before handing a machine on. Activating on a new computer releases the old one automatically, so switching machines needs no support request.

Your license is tied to the computer it was activated on, through an identifier built from that machine's characteristics and stored locally alongside the license. This is why copying the license file to another computer does not work: the identifier will not match what is stored, and the badge will read Mismatch. Activate normally on the new machine instead.

Checks and working offline

The license is checked when the panel opens and roughly every half hour while you work. If the service cannot be reached, SuperFind keeps working for 24 hours from the last successful check; past that, the badge turns to Offline and you will need to get back online. A key for a different product is refused outright rather than half-activated.

12. Known limits

Worth knowing before they surprise you:

Something not covered here, or not behaving the way this page says? Write to us from the contact page.