The only indication of what syntactic entity a character belongs to is the highlighting style. Highlighting is done Scintilla lexers. The set of syntax entities is filetype dependent (keywords, strings, comments, etc). A dialog that provided a checklist of entities to select would have to be different for each filetype and synchronised with Scintilla each release (adding to the workload of incorporating a Scintilla release).
It is therefore unlikely to be implemented. Instead you can simply be more specific in your search terms for replacement, eg replace $y with $x instead of just y with x. This will also stop you changing $why to $whx or the comment `// why yell you yowee` to `// whx xell xou xowee` both of which which the syntax check would still allow. --- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/geany/geany/issues/834#issuecomment-166033125
