How to Search for and Insert New Lines in Sublime Text

In Sublime Text, the term "search for a new line" can refer to two distinct actions: finding newline characters within your document's content using search functionalities, or understanding the commands and shortcuts to quickly insert new lines of code. This guide covers both aspects to help you navigate and edit your text files efficiently.

Searching for Newline Characters in Your Document

To search for actual newline characters (\n, \r, or \r\n) within your code or text, Sublime Text leverages its powerful regular expression search capabilities. This is essential for tasks like finding empty lines, inconsistent line endings, or specific patterns that involve line breaks.

Steps to Search Using Regular Expressions:

1. Open the Search Panel: Press Cmd+F (Mac) or Ctrl+F (Windows/Linux) to open the search bar at the bottom of your Sublime Text window.
2. Enable Regular Expressions: Click the .* icon on the left side of the search bar. This icon toggles the regular expression engine on or off. When active, it will be highlighted.
3. Enter Newline Patterns:
   • \n: Represents a Unix-style newline character (Line Feed).
   • \r: Represents a Carriage Return character (common in older Mac systems).
   • \r\n: Represents a Windows-style newline sequence (Carriage Return followed by Line Feed).
   • \n\n: Can be used to find two consecutive newlines, often indicating an empty line between paragraphs.
   • ^$: When regex is enabled, this pattern finds entirely empty lines. ^ matches the beginning of a line, and $ matches the end of a line.
4. Execute Search: Press Enter to find the next occurrence or Alt+Enter (Mac/Windows/Linux) to find all occurrences and select them.

Practical Examples of Newline Character Search:

• Finding all empty lines:
  • Enable regex (.*).
  • Search for ^$.
• Replacing Windows newlines with Unix newlines:
  • Enable regex (.*).
  • Search for \r\n.
  • Open the Replace panel (Cmd+H or Ctrl+H).
  • Replace with \n.
• Locating lines ending with specific text followed by a newline:
  • Enable regex (.*).
  • Search for your_text_here\n.

For more in-depth information on regular expressions in Sublime Text, you can refer to resources like the Sublime Text Unofficial Documentation which provides a comprehensive guide.

Inserting New Lines

Beyond searching for existing newline characters, Sublime Text offers efficient shortcuts to insert new lines of code or text without manually moving the cursor to the end of the current line and pressing Enter. This significantly speeds up coding and writing workflows.

Quickly Inserting New Lines:

• Insert New Line Below: To insert a new line directly below your current cursor position, irrespective of where your cursor is on the current line, use:
  • Mac: Cmd–Return
  • Windows/Linux: Ctrl–Enter
    This action creates a new, empty line, and places your cursor at the beginning of it, ready for input.
• Insert New Line Above: To insert a new line directly above your current cursor position, similarly, without needing to move to the beginning of the line:
  • Mac: Shift+Cmd–Return
  • Windows/Linux: Shift+Ctrl–Enter

These shortcuts are incredibly useful for quickly adding new statements, comments, or paragraphs.

Keybindings for Inserting New Lines

Action	Mac Shortcut	Windows/Linux Shortcut	Description
Insert Line Below	Cmd–Return	Ctrl–Enter	Adds a new line immediately after the current line, cursor on the new line.
Insert Line Above	Shift+Cmd–Return	Shift+Ctrl–Enter	Adds a new line immediately before the current line, cursor on the new line.
Standard New Line	Enter	Enter	Behaves as a typical new line, moving the cursor to the next line.

For a complete overview of Sublime Text's default keybindings and how to customize them, consult the Sublime Text Documentation on Key Bindings.

Additional Line Manipulation Commands

Sublime Text also provides other commands to manage lines efficiently:

• Join Lines: Cmd+J (Mac) or Ctrl+J (Windows/Linux) merges the current line with the line below it, removing the newline character and inserting a space if necessary.
• Split into Lines: To convert a selection into multiple lines (e.g., separating comma-separated values onto individual lines), highlight the text and use Cmd+Shift+L (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+L (Windows/Linux) after replacing the separator with a newline character.

By mastering both regular expression search for newline characters and the quick shortcuts for inserting new lines, you can significantly enhance your productivity in Sublime Text.