My understanding for getting Textastic is that it's a great text editor for Programmer's, created with programmer's in mind. That's why I got it.

Typing an escape character to have the benefit of \t and \n and maybe more (\r ?), in a Search is well worth the trade off.

I would not vote for the option of: Normal, Extended, and Regex.

I like Textastic just the way it is now.

Thank you, Alexander.

When I typed in 5 backslashes, then it selected 3 and worked. But 3 and 4 backslashes only selected 2. Good catch! I hadn't encountered this yet. Thank you.

You're probably using Regular Expression as your search type, and the 1st backslash is being interpreted as an escape character.

Change your Search type to Text (under the gear icon) and it will work.

I see this is a very old thread, yet no one has mentioned that you can do that now with Split View and open a 2nd copy of Textastic. I just tested it and it works great.