Cluster-based find and replace
Robert Clell Miller, Alisa M. Marshall · 2004
In current text editors, the find & replace command offers only two options: replace one match at a time prompting for confirmation, or replace all matches at once without any confirmation. Both approaches are prone to errors. This paper explores a third way: cluster-based find & replace, in which the matches are clustered by similarity and whole clusters can be replaced at once. We hypothesized that cluster-based find & replace would make find & replace tasks both faster and more accurate, but initial user studies suggest that clustering may improve speed on some tasks but not accuracy. Users also prefer using a perfect-selection strategy for find & replace, rather than an interleaved decision-action strategy.