Most Xcode users quickly become familiar with the basics of the Find Navigator panel.

With it, you can find text, regular expressions, and perform search-and-replace, whether matching or ignoring case. But that’s just scratching the surface of the Find Navigator.

I thought I’d drop a few words today about search scopes. Controlled from the bottom left,  under the search field, you can create narrowed searches. This enables you to, for example, search only in Swift files or exclude files containing the word Test.

To get started, click the icon (two lines with three squares on a line between them) and then New Scope (the plus icon). Here, you can name the scope, limit the search extent, and add criteria for exactly which files should be included or not.

The logic is straightforward. You choose where to look (the project, a folder, or through the entire SDK), and whether to include all conditions or some conditions:

Each condition is based on the file name, path, extension, UTI (the kind of file, like image which is useful for finding vector assets), Workspace location (namely groups), or source control status (handy for finding newly applied changes.)

Most of my conditions are file-name-based. And for those, you get the following matching conditions. The “ends with” is an obvious win for extensions (although you can also use UTIs for that), and “starts with” can help for projects organized in hierarchical ways.

Now, interestingly enough, this list fails to offer “does not contain” but that’s fairly easy to work around. Since Xcode supports regex matching, you can easily replicate “does not contain” with an appropriate regex:

Change the file name to a path to exclude source file directories.

You can create as many search domains as you like. At least, I haven’t found an upper bound yet. I haven’t found a way to reorder the find scopes, although if you’re really controlling about this, you can pop into  your workspace (ProjectName.xcodeproj/project.xcworkspace/xcuserdata/username.xcuserdatad), convert your UserInterfaceState.xcuserstate to xml (plutil -convert xml1), and hand-edit it the way you need.

There are lots of wonderful little Xcode tweaks like these throughout this monster of an IDE. What are some of your faves? If I have time this week, I’ll share some of mine, such as the four-square — another of my favorite tools — and a few great ways to connect your editor to the navigator.