Finding a specific piece of text in Ditto previously required opening project after project, or scrolling your component library until you spotted it. Global Search lets you search across every project and your component library at once — by text, notes, developer ID, or component name — and jump straight to the result.
When to use Global Search
Reach for Global Search whenever you need to locate a text item or component without knowing exactly where it lives. A few common cases:
Find every place a phrase like "Get started" appears across all of your projects.
Track down a text item or component by its developer ID.
Pull up everything assigned to a teammate, tagged a certain way, or still in Draft — even without a search term.
Search the text of a specific variant (for example, your German copy) rather than the base text.
Open Global Search
Click Search in the left sidebar to open the search page. From here you can run a query, narrow what you're searching, and filter or sort the results.
Run a search
Type your search term into the search bar.
Press Enter or click Search.
By default, Global Search looks across all text fields — the text value, notes, developer ID, and component name — and matches both text items in your projects and components in your library.
Match an exact phrase or any word
Use the quote button (””) in the search bar to control how your term is matched:
On (default) — matches your term as an exact, contiguous phrase. Searching
error messagereturns text containing "error message" together.Off — matches any of the words in your term. Searching
error messagereturns text containing "error" or "message."
💡 Searches are case-insensitive
Search specific fields
In the search bar, click In: to limit your search to one or more fields — Text value, Developer ID, Component name, or Notes. Leave it empty to search all fields at once.
Search base text or variants
Under Search across, choose where to look:
Base text — your default text (on by default).
Variants — pick one or more variants to search their text instead of, or in addition to, the base text.
How matching works across base and variants
When you search across more than one place — base text plus a variant, or several variants — an item is a match only when a single place (the base, or one specific variant) satisfies everything you've asked for at once: your search term and every filter you've added (status, assignee, and so on). Some details aren't variant-specific — like a developer ID or tags, which belong to the text item as a whole. Those always use the item's shared value, so they count toward a match in any variant.
For example: You search Get started across base and your Mobile variant, then add a Status: In Review filter. If Get started appears only in the Mobile variant, but Mobile is In Progress while the base is In Review, the item won't appear — no single place has both Get started and the In Review status. Matches from different variants aren't combined.
Narrow by result type
Use the All results / Text items / Components toggle to show everything, only text items, or only library components.
Filter your results
Click Filter to add any of the following. Filters stack, and each appears as a pill beneath the search bar:
Project — limit results to one or more projects. (This narrows to text items only.)
Status — show only text in a given workflow status, such as Draft or In Review.
Assignee — show text assigned to specific people, or with no assignee.
Tags — filter by tags, matching items that include any of the selected tags (default) or all of them.
Variants — show only items that have the selected variant(s) defined.
Integrated — show only items that are (or aren't) connected to a developer integration.
Plurals — show only items that have (or don't have) plural forms.
Character limit — show only items that have (or don't have) a character limit set.
💡 You can run a search with filters alone and no search term — for example, to list every item assigned to you, or every item/component with a character limit
Sort your results
By default, results are sorted by Relevance. Use the sort menu above the results to switch to:
Created (Newest) or Created (Oldest)
Edited (Most recent) or Edited (Least recent)
Read a result
Each result card shows where the item lives and what matched:
The folder path and project (for text items) or component name (for components), plus a copyable developer ID badge.
The text value, with the part that matched your search highlighted.
Details such as status, tags, assignee, comments, plurals, and whether the item is integrated with Figma.
A variant or plural section when your search matched within one.
The results summary shows how many results you're viewing — click Show total count to see the full number of matches. If there are more results, click Load more at the bottom to fetch the next set.
Open a result
Click any result to open it in a new tab — text items open in their project, and components open in your library — so your search stays open.