This Bugzilla instance is a read-only archive of historic NetBeans bug reports. To report a bug in NetBeans please follow the project's instructions for reporting issues.
Under the "Edit" pulldown menu, select "Replace" and note the following: a) the "Find What" box is only one line tall, b) the "Replace With" box is only one line tall, c) if you paste a multi-line selection into either, it's collapsed into a single line that's very difficult to read or revise. This makes using NetBeans out-of-the-question for me, because I frequently need to replace a "paragraph" of code with another paragraph - not just a word or a phrase here and there. For a better implementation of find/replace, you might care to refer (for example) the the old CuteHTML editor. (I recently migrated from PC to Mac, and was unable to download CuteHTML because it's no longer supported by GlobalSoft. I hoped NetBeans (or Komodo) might do the job, but this huge deficiency means I'm still looking...
The "regular expression" checkbox allows you to use escape characters in both search and replace, maybe not as intuitive as a multi-line search box but it does the trick for me. Example, to search for: </div> <div> you can type: </div>\n<div> Maybe it could be improved translating tabs, newlines, etc to the relative escape characters when text is pasted in the box as in Gnome's gedit.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 148989 ***