A workspace-wide replacement should begin with a complete preview and end with a reverse search. The editor can find and change matching text, but it cannot decide whether an occurrence inside a quotation, historical note, or example is supposed to keep the old wording. Make that decision before you press Replace.
Imagine a nine-chapter draft in which a place name has changed late in revision. The old marker appears 17 times. Thirteen uses belong to current narration and should change; four are quoted or intentionally preserved. This is exactly the situation where a fast global replacement can create quiet errors that are harder to notice than the old spelling.
Divide the workspace by approval status
In the working example, the nine editable chapters were placed under approved/. Two files containing four intentional exceptions were kept under excluded/. The sample markers were OLD585 and NEW585, so the counts could be checked without ambiguity.
You do not have to rearrange a real project permanently. A temporary copy is enough. What matters is that the scope of the replacement can be stated as a path, not as a vague promise to “skip the quotations.”
Use this rule for every match:
- Approve it when the old term refers to the renamed subject in current prose.
- Exclude it when the old form is quoted, discussed as an old name, or preserved for historical accuracy.
- Hold it when one sentence is not enough to decide. Resolve held cases individually before the batch change.
Preview first, then make the count prove the action
Work through the replacement in this order:
- Search the whole working copy for the old term and record the total.
- Read the surrounding sentence for all matches and separate approved, excluded, and held cases.
- Limit the replacement scope to the approved files or folder.
- Run a preview and require its count to equal the approved count.
- Apply the change, then search the approved scope for the old term and the excluded scope separately.
In this example the arithmetic was 17 total = 13 approved + 4 excluded. A preview over approved/ returned 13, and the applied replacement also returned 13. The reverse search then found zero old markers in the approved scope, while the excluded copy still contained four. Each number answers a different question; none should be omitted.
Why a preview is not merely a confirmation screen
The preview is the moment to catch a scope mistake. If it returns 17 instead of 13, the exclusions are still inside the operation. If it returns 12, one approved file is missing. If the count is right but the contexts are wrong, the classification was wrong.
This is also why replacing and then checking only the new spelling is weak. Thirteen new occurrences do not prove that the four exceptions survived. Search both sides of the decision.
The observed boundary
The recorded run searched nine approved files, previewed 13 replacements, applied 13 replacements, and read back zero old markers there. It separately searched two excluded files and read back four unchanged exceptions. The semantic split was made by a person before Rune Studio operated on the approved folder.
The run does not support automatic interpretation of quotations, every regular-expression feature, or replacement in binary documents. If your project contains generated files, translations, or external folders, decide explicitly whether they belong in scope.
Using Rune Studio for the bounded replacement
Rune Studio's current Mac documentation describes file search, selected-file or selected-folder search, workspace search, and review before replacement, including open unsaved tabs in workspace operations. That makes it suitable for a workflow where the approved scope is explicit and the result is checked afterward.
Test the procedure on a duplicate workspace first, especially when open unsaved tabs are involved. You can review the current Mac version on the Rune Studio website.
The decision that prevents replacement mistakes
The safe finish line is not “the new term appears.” It is this three-part result: the preview count matched the approved list, the reverse search of the changed scope returned zero, and the excluded scope retained its expected count.
Write those three values beside the replacement note. For the sample they were 13 previewed and replaced / 0 old in approved / 4 old in excluded. With that record, a workspace replacement becomes a reviewable editorial decision instead of an irreversible sweep.