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I'm typesetting a document and to make it more editable I'd like to find a nice way to write the document making custom commands left and right for my ease, then go and replace them with their non-custom definitions.

For instance, I have the following defined in a separate preamble file:

\newcommand{\mb}[1]{\mathbb{#1}}

that simply makes it easier when I'm using blackboard bold characters a bunch throughout the document. However, whoever might be editing the document later might have difficulty parsing the code (he's old, etc.) with my custom commands floating around everywhere. Is there a nice and easy way to go through my document and replace every

\mb{A}

with 

\mathbb{A}

so I don't have to sift through hundreds of "replace" dialogues?

This would also help if I want to change the name of a command I've used in previous files.

Edit to add MWE:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\newcommand{\mb}[1]{\mathbb{#1}} 
\begin{document}
\mb{R}
\end{document}

to

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\newcommand{\mb}[1]{\mathbb{#1}} 
\begin{document}
\mathbb{R}
\end{document}
Mico
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walkar
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    This is a task for a good editor supporting regular expressions. I use UltraEdit, Emacs and Notepad++ which all support this. – Uwe Ziegenhagen Feb 18 '14 at 06:22
  • That would require learning about regular expressions. Texmaker is my native IDE and I don't know if it supports regular expressions (although I know I can just run them on a different editor). I can bite the bullet and just learn them, but if possible I'd rather just input strings into an existing structure for this task. – walkar Feb 18 '14 at 06:24
  • I'll check if Texmaker allows that. Thanks! To both you, and Uwe Ziegenhagen. – walkar Feb 18 '14 at 06:38
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    Texmaker can definitely do find and replace, look under the Edit menu. See also http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/67709/is-there-a-script-that-reads-a-tex-file-and-replaces-every-instance-of-a-newcom/ – Torbjørn T. Feb 18 '14 at 07:06
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    your human editors will thank you for this consideration. well, maybe they won't even know that you did it, but they surely won't curse you for not doing it. – barbara beeton Feb 18 '14 at 14:04
  • This question has been answered here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/67709/171626 – Jolly Llama Mar 16 '19 at 18:30
  • This question has been answered here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/67709/171626 – Jolly Llama Mar 16 '19 at 18:31

1 Answers1

4

Globally replacing all instances of \mb{ with \mathbb{ should be feasible with just about every modern editor. No "regular" expressions involved in such an operation, as far as I can tell.

Mico
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