Memos have full support for the common Find and Replace operations. Let's leave them for the next chapter though, and start with something less ordinary and more exciting.

MemoSearch is a way of rapidly locating text in a Memo. Here's how it works. Let's open some Memo with a few pages of text (if you don't want to "play along" just imagine you opened one). On the toolbar, let's start by selecting some Match Highlight Color by clicking the little dropdown arrow. Yellow may be a reasonable choice. Once this is done, let's move a bit to the left where we have the Match 1 combo box. This is where we shall type the text we want to locate, e.g., "the" (there should be a bunch of those in whatever Memo we chose for this exercise). Hit Enter – or click on the Match Highlight Color button with the mouse (this time, you'd click the button itself, as opposed to invoking its dropdown Color Picker).

You should now see all occurrences of the text we were searching for highlighted with the color we chose – everywhere in the entire Memo (or within the selection if there was one). Not only that, but the positions of all found matches are marked with the same color on the dark-gray MatchBar on the right-hand side of the Memo. The MatchBar represents the entire length of the Memo, so some matches it might be showing may not be currently displayed if they are on another "page" of a long Memo. You can of course get to them using the regular Memo's scrollbar, but there's another way: just click on the match in the MatchBar – and the match appears right next to the point you clicked. Actually, you can click anywhere on the MatchBar, not just on matches: it can be used as an alternative to a scrollbar regardless of matches, if any.

Let's make sure there's no selection in the Memo (to search through its entirety) and let's change the Match Highlight Color to light-blue. A new MemoSearch (for some other word) – and a new set of light-blue matches appears in both the Memo and the MatchBar. You can continue with more searches and more colors, but you get the idea.

There's more though. More pairs of Match combo boxes and Match Highlight Color buttons, that is. In fact, there are 4 of them. Each pair is fully independent from the others: it can have its own favorite Highlight Color, and it remembers its own separate list of most recently used search expressions. You may never need all 4 pairs, but at least you can select your preferred Highlight Colors for, say, two of them, and use them interchangeably. This way you won't have to switch colors as often. Or you might be organized enough to want to separate your searches so that each Match combo boxes maintains some logically-organized list of relevant search expressions. Whatever your needs may be, the 4 MemoSearch pairs of controls are there for you.

That's not all. Sometimes you may want to highlight some text "by hand" without ever searching for it. Easily done: just select the text you want and hit the Mark Selection button .

The text gets highlighted with the current Marker color of that button. Pick the color you like using the dropdown. Mark Selection is an InstaButton, so you can have as many of them as you like -  each with its own color.

Clear a Single Match lets you get rid of the match that you pick from the dropdown menu of that button. For highlighted matches produced as a result of a MemoSearch, this will clear all occurrences highlighted by it. So, if our first MemoSearch for the word "the" produced 100 matches, all of them will get cleared.

Clear All Matches goes even further and clears... well, all matches produced by all MemoSearches and all manual highlighting done using Mark Selection.

It's not quite over yet. Okay, so maybe you have this Memo with 10 different MemoSearches and 20 different Marked Selections. And at this point in time you don't want to see all this flashy highlighting: you just want to quietly read the Memo or maybe edit some of it. But all that highlighting has been done for a reason, and just clearing it would be wasteful. The solution is easy. Just turn off the display of the highlighting. This doesn't affect the Memo in any way, just the way the highlighting is shown on-screen. To turn highlighting On or Off, there's a little button at the bottom of the MatchBar of every Memo .

There's also a single Global Match Highlight Level button that will affect all Memos in all InfoViews in Alventis. Actually, both of these buttons are not On/Off buttons but rather "dimmer switches" with 3 states: Full highlighting, Dimmed, and Off. The Global Level takes precedence over any "local" Levels of individual Memos: if the Global Level is Off, for example, all Memos have their highlighting off regardless of what their current individual Level is. If the Global Level is Dimmed, Memos can't "go beyond" the Dimmed Level: they can be just Off or Dimmed. It's clearer if you just play with it a bit. Memos remember their Highlight Level setting and preserve it when closed and re-opened.

Note that since there's nothing else to see in a MatchBar, they always show all matches with Full Highlight Level.

- Are we there yet?

- No!

The act of highlighting something in a Memo is an editing operation. This means that you are actually modifying the Memo whenever you perform a MemoSearch or Mark Selection.

This also means that you can save any highlighting you have in a Memo by posting your changes. If that's what you want to do, that is. If you were just casually looking for something and don't need the corresponding highlighting, all you have to do is cancel your changes. You can of course clear existing highlighting at any time using one of the Clear buttons.

And finally, there's a little multi-user issue... In a multi-user environment, the same Memo may obviously be viewed by many users, and all of them may be searching for something, and marking it with colors that may not be to your liking, and... well, it's clear that things would very quickly get ugly or at least confusing. Which is why every user's highlighting is only visible to that user and nobody else.

This only applies to highlighting described in this chapter. All "normal" editing operations, for instance, changing text background color (which may also be seen as a kind of highlighting, but which has nothing to do with the special kind we're talking about here), all regular editing operations are user-agnostic, and as such will be visible to everyone.

Congratulations! End of chapter.