[Amy_de_l-ABC]

Hey, sorry it took me a couple days to answer. My brothers got back from college yesterday, so things have been a bit crazy...well, and tbh they're always a bit crazy haha.

Name replacement seems to be a find and replace.

Yeah, the name replacement is essentially that. Can also be used for pronouns (possibly what they mean by role reversal, though I still don't know), replacing swear words, etc.

You could do a lot of damage with that, there is no " are you sure" step, and I doubt it makes a backup of the book before changing it.

You know, that didn't even occur to me before I started playing with it... Haha it probably should have, although in my defense, I've also used a Chrome add-on (or plugin or whatever they're called) that I think worked much the same way, and it didn't do anything permanent. (Then again, it couldn't really, since the thing was posted online... But yeah.)

In any case, I've just done a bit more experimentation, since you brought that up (IDC that much if my name gets permanently stuck in the stories XD And if worse came to worst, I have an ebook editor, so I could always change it back). The first thing I noticed is that it seems to save your replacements between books. So, like, I had put my name, hair color, and eye color in last night for a story, and this morning, when I opened a different book, those replacements were all still there, and editable. That bodes well for the non-permanent damage idea, I think Then I tried putting in a replacement, closing the book, and reopening, and I was still able to get rid of the change. It was also still editable after closing and reopening the program with a change in text. So yeah, I don't think we need to worry about damage too much. Seems like an entirely temporary edit!

I did not test if it only applies to complete words.
So if you can askmit to change cat to dog, does that change cathedral to doghedral ?

Figured I might as well test this out while I'm at it. Sadly, it does seem to include partial words (I replaced "ex" with "ex-boyfriend", just because it was the first thing that popped into my head, and instead of "extra" I got "ex-boyfriendtra"). This includes it replacing things mid-word (e.g. "art > music" made "starting" into "stmusicing").

HOWEVER. There are 2 things about this. One is that there's that "Use regular expression" checkbox. Idk much about regular expressions, but if I'm not mistaken, you can enter more specific criteria there for when to change the word. (May research more later if I have time/energy/inclination.) The other, for those of us who would rather not learn regular expressions, is a trick I've learned for use with other "find and replace"-type things: if you want it to only look for the entire word, put spaces before and after it. So, to use your example, instead of "cat" in the first blank space, you'd put "_cat_" (shown here with underscores instead of spaces for easy reading). This would then only replace instances of "cat" if they had those spaces before and after, so neither "cathedral" nor "concatenate" nor "bobcat" would be harmed. This can also be used to specify whether it's the beginning or end of a word. Like if you want it to only replace stuff at the end, you'd do "cat_" (again, with spaces instead of underscores), and that would catch "bobcat" (unless the author has accidentally run that and the next word together or something) but not "cathedral" or "concatenate." Likewise, if you use "_cat," it should change "cathedral" but not "concatenate" or "bobcat." (Please note that I haven't actually tested this within Moon+, but it's often worked for me with things like "Find in well page," so I'm fairly sure it will work here, too. Again, I may do more testing at some point if I feel like it and am able.)

There is no feedback as to how many changes it has made

Yeah, I have to admit that feature would be nice... Maybe we should suggest it Idk if there's a place for that on their website, but we could always email them.

I did search Google but failed to find any explanation or documentation.

Yup, that was my problem, too. 'S why I posted here.

I assume it is case sensitive,

I've just tested this, too. It is.

Thanks for your reply! Hopefully this clears some things up for you in return!

Oh, and one more thing I found out the other day--the reason it wasn't appearing in my miscellaneous settings menu? Because apparently the default is it showing in the sideways-ellipsis menu. HOWEVER, if you uncheck the box that says "Show "Names replacement" in menu," it gives you a little popup that says ""Names replacement" was moved to "Miscellaneous"." I checked, and sure enough, it has! (It's near the bottom, after you scroll past most of the options and get to the little buttons like "Link colors," Image display options," etc. Mine is appearing at the top of that list of buttons. )