The Lovers, the Dreamers, and Me

As you progress in your Scrivener projects, you may want to find various words or texts in your files. While Scrivener’s find and replace feature is powerful, and its Project Search lets you find text throughout your projects – in text files, research, and more – the Find by Formatting feature goes one step further.

Instead of searching for specific words or text strings as with the other find features, Find by Formatting searches for text formatted in specific ways. If you want to search for bold text, revision marks, highlighted text, or text formatted with specific styles, Find by Formatting can do this. This is especially useful if you’ve put comments or highlights in texts to mark things to come back to when you revise your draft.

How to access Find by Formatting

There are three ways to access the Find by Formatting feature.
– From the Edit menu: choose Edit > Find > Find by Formatting.
– Use a keyboard shortcut: on Mac, press Comamnd-Option-Control-F; on Windows, press Alt+Shift+F.
– Click the downward-pointing chevron next to the magnifying glass in the toolbar and choose Find by Formatting.

The dialogue that displays defaults to finding highlighted text in all documents in your project with the default highlight color. The Containing Text field is empty; you don’t need to enter text here, since Scrivener searches formatting, though you can specify text with the selected formatting if you want.

The Search in field lets you choose between All Documents or Current Editor. The latter narrows down the search to currently visible text in the Editor and can be much faster than searching across a large project with a lot of research files.

Which types of formatting can you find this way?

You can use Find by Formatting to search for a variety of formatting types; click the Find menu in the Find by Formatting dialogue to choose from the following:

• Highlighted Text
• Comments & Footnotes
• Inline Annotations
• Inline Footnotes
• Revision Color
• Colored Text
• Style
• Character Format
• Links
• Images
• Tables
• Preserved Formatting Text (text marked with Format > Preserve Formatting, which you might want to use to override compile formatting)

Learn more about using comments, footnotes, and annotations; revision mode; styles and blank styles; and images in Scrivener.

Why use these types of formatting in Scrivener projects?

You use these formatting types in many different ways. Styles change the way your text displays while you are working. They can help structure your project with things like headers and separating sections within files. But in most cases, they will be overridden by section layouts when you compile your project.

Many writers use highlighting, comments, and annotations to mark things to come back to as they work. Rather than stopping to research while writing, it’s practical to mark bits of text you want to change or verify with one of these types of formatting. When editing your draft, you can resolve all of these before doing a full re-read of your work.

When Find by Formatting is useful

You probably won’t use Find by Formatting while you’re writing your first draft, though you may want to use it to find comments or annotations you’ve made as you progress to check things for consistency. (See Use Annotations, Comments, & Footnotes in Your Scrivener Projects.)

Find by Formatting is most useful when you’re revising your draft. As you progress to your second or third draft, you may want to find changes you’ve made using Scrivener’s Revision Mode. You can go through your documents searching for different revision levels to check on all your changes.

Another way to use Find by Formatting is to find colored text. In Write Now with Scrivener, Episode no. 63, actor and birder Lili Taylor shared how she uses this feature. She changes the color of texts that she might want to delete from her projects, then goes back to them later. “Graying out text that I might not use is better than striking through or deleting it. I do that with a very quick keyboard shortcut. Then, with Scrivener, I use Find by Formatting [to find colored text] in gray. I go through my whole document. Once I think I could let go of this gray text, I don’t think I’m going to use this anymore, I take all my gray text out, and I put it into a new document I call Gray.”

Find by Formatting can also be useful if you use inline annotations of different colors to indicate priority for items to check or correct. You can search by color, finding the highest-priority annotations to resolve, then search for the others.

Using Find by Formatting

When you display the Find by Formatting dialogue as mentioned above and start searching for text, the dialogue remains visible above your Scrivener window. You can move it to the side of the screen, and you can go through formatted text found using the Next or Previous buttons on the dialogue. You can also use keyboard shortcuts to do this:

• On Mac: Find Next Formatting (Command-Option-Shift-G) / Find Previous Formatting (Control-Option-Shift-G)
• On Windows: Find Next Formatting (Shift+G) / Find Previous Formatting (Ctrl+Shift+G)

This allows you to quickly step through text formatted in specific ways to find those bits of text, comments, or annotations that you want to change or delete.

While Find by Formatting is not something you’ll use often, it is valuable when editing or revising your draft. As one of Scrivener’s powerful search tools, it gives you another option to find anything in your projects.

Show notes:

• Uprising
• The Power of Holding Silence: Making the Workplace Work for Women
• Write Now with Scrivener Episode 62: Erica Wagner, Novelist and Literary Editor
• The 100 best novels of all time – The Guardian
• The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Learn more about Scrivener, and check out the ebook Take Control of Scrivener.

If you like the podcast, please follow it on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Leave a rating or review, and tell your friends. And check out past episodes of Write Now with Scrivener.

Tahmima Anam’s fifth novel, Uprising, is a finalist for the 2026 Orwell Prize.

Tahmima Anam was born in Bangladesh and grew up in Paris, New York, and Bangkok. I asked her what nationality she felt she was. “I had a peripatetic childhood because my father worked for the UN for 15 years while I was growing up. When I was a junior in high school, we returned to Bangladesh. I very much feel like I am a Bangladeshi, that my stories come from Bangladesh, that my politics are geared towards that part of the world. And yet I will always be an outsider because I didn’t grow up there.”

This idea of being an outsider is what drives her writing. “I think that the condition of most writers is that we don’t feel comfortable anywhere. Even a person who has grown up within one community and has had one set of values or one culture. A person who is totally bought into that world will not become the writer of that tribe. It will be somebody who feels like an outsider. I think my own personal journey in relationship to my identity has been to embrace the fact that outsiderness is my home. That is where the creative impulse comes from, is that sense of seeking a home or how I write my way into stories.”

We briefly talked about the weather, as two people in the UK do, it being an early heat wave in the country. Tahmima said, “I was at the Hay Festival last weekend, and I spoke to a few novelists, and we said that all novels set in the contemporary moment must address this issue of the climate crisis because it’s no longer an abstract idea.”

Climate change is a side character in Uprising, which takes place on an island which is a floating brothel. This reminder of the effects of climate change affects how the inhabitants are treated. “The island floods, and they occasionally have to take shelter on the roofs of their huts, which are very flimsy. When there is a cyclone, they are not allowed into the cyclone shelter because they’re sex workers. Eventually, the island will be subsumed by the water. So this kind of sense of daily emergency, of precarity, of uncertainty is something that pervades every aspect of the book.”

Uprising is about this island brothel, in a country where prostitution is legal, but where the women are all trafficked and cannot leave. A girl named Kusum comes to the island and is seen as a sort of savior by the children, who are the ones telling the story. “When Kusum arrives, she’s so different from the other women on the island that they believe that she’s been sent to save them. Kusum herself rejects this trope. At first, she’s in it for herself. She wants to get off the island. She doesn’t care about the women. It’s only when she realizes that she’s not going to get off the island without the rest of them that she starts to come up with this idea of a strike.”

The novel is inspired by the island Banishanta in Bangladesh, which was the subject of a number of articles in the past, including The Sinking Brothel. Tahmima says that her novel is loosely based on that island, and that she visited the island, “but not until after I had finished writing the book. I’d heard about the island, and I wanted to set a novel there. But I knew that if I visited, it would be very hard to disconnect the real people that I met there from my characters. It was very important to me that the characters stood on their own. When I had finished the novel, I went to the island. There were some almost shocking parallels between what I had written, things that I could never have known, that turned out to be true. There were also some significant differences. I’m very glad that I made that decision, because the novel is an act of imagination. It’s not based on real characters, but it is certainly inspired by that very place.”

Tahmima has been using Scrivener since 2010, when she wrote her second novel The Good Muslim, and has used it for every book since then. “I found it enormously useful because, in that novel, I was going between the points of view of two different characters. It made it much easier for me to keep track of the two different voices rather than have one long document or two documents that I would try to stitch together.”

Tahmima also pointed out how useful the Binder is, which shows the structure of her books. “It’s really useful to be able to see it all [in the Binder]. You have a sense of the shape of your book. I can look on the left side and see that this section has three chapters, and this section has ten. That’s not a good balance. Having a kind of visual sense of the different sections is also extremely helpful.”

One of the blurbs on Uprising is from Salman Rushdie, who calls the novel “A miracle.” Tahmima said, “It was a huge honor for me. In fact, I was asked to name my 10 best novels of all time, and Midnight’s Children was at the top of the list. He’s been a huge hero of mine and a person I’ve long admired.”