Regular expression search replace in Sublime Text 2

By the way, in the question above:

For:

Hello, my name is bob

Find part:

my name is (\w)+

With replace part:

my name used to be \1

Would return:

Hello, my name used to be b

Change find part to:

my name is (\w+)

And replace will be what you expect:

Hello, my name used to be bob

While (\w)+ will match "bob", it is not the grouping you want for replacement.

Usually a back-reference is either $1 or \1 (backslash one) for the first capture group (the first match of a pattern in parentheses), and indeed Sublime supports both syntaxes. So try:

my name used to be \1

or

my name used to be $1

Also note that your original capture pattern:

my name is (\w)+

is incorrect and will only capture the final letter of the name rather than the whole name. You should use the following pattern to capture all of the letters of the name:

my name is (\w+)