[Toadling]

Originally Posted by bigcloits

Now we just need some way to prepend text to selected actions. Often we want actions to be verbified. The title of a book is the title of a book, but stick "read " in front of it and now it's an action. But there's no convenient way to do this sort of thing to a selection of many actions. I grep it in BBEdit ... ;-) (Geeeeeeeek.)

Ah, but we do have a way! Have you tried a Regular Expression search and replace in OmniFocus?

Try to isolate the items you want to change by either focusing on the project, doing a filter with the Search field in the toolbar, placing the items in a separate folder, etc. This isn't strictly necessary, but it helps contain your changes (the search and replace dialog seems to act only on the items currently displayed in the content area).

Then hit Command-F to bring up the Find window and set it like this:



I think the "Replace" and "Replace All" buttons only work on currently selected text in edit mode (handy, but not what we want here). So use the Next button to test what items match your search expression. Each click of the button takes you to the next matching record and puts it into edit mode with the matching string highlighted. You can then use the "Replace & Find" button to systematically step through the matching records to apply the change.

Note that using the "Replace & Find" button will also operate on text in the note field. So if you don't want your change to be applied there, skip them by hitting the "Next" button instead.

Also note that OmniFocus crashed once when I was trying various regular expression patterns. I'm not sure what the problem was and submitted a crash report. YMMV, but it's probably a good a idea to backup your database ahead of time just in case.

OmniFocus' Find window isn't as powerful as BBEdit's Grep search and replace, but it's still quite useful.