When you start CasualConc, you are in Concord.  If you used other tool, click Concord tab on the window.

Before the search, if your corpus has many non-standard alphabets (means characters other than a-z A-Z), change the language setting to European Language B in Preferences -> Concord. For more information about language settings on Concord, check this page.  The current language mode is displayed at the right bottom corner of the window and can be changed by clicking it.

Once you set your language, simply type the word you want to search in the search box and click Search or hit Return/Enter key.  The current version of CasualConc ignores cases.  For more detailed information about search syntax and wildcard characters, check Wildcard Search.

You can change the Span of the context (number of characters in left/right contexts).

The number of occurrences and how many files have the search word will be shown on the upper right corner of the window.

The search result will be displayed in the Concordance view with the file names.  Clicking a concordance line will show the word in a larger context in the Context view. 

Because this Context view is built on OS X technology, you can use context menu (right click or Control + click).

One of the useful feature is Look Up in Dictionary.  If you set your Dictionary.app to open in a dictionary panel, a tiny dictionary panel shows up when you select Look Up in Dictionary.  Otherwise, the Dictionary.app starts up.

Depending on your setting, different dictionary shows up.  In my case, the Japanese-English dictionary is set as the primary dictionary, so the entry in the Japanese-English dictionary shows up as a first choice.  If the same word is on other dictionaries, you can choose them by clicking the dictionary name on the bottom left corner of the dictionary window (it says 英和／和英辞典 [English-Japanese/Japanese-English dictionary] in the picture).

You can also use Find panel with Command + F (short cut for find) [click the Context view first].  Because the entire content of the file that includes the selected concordance line is shown in the Context view, you can search words/phrases in the entire document.  This is a workaround when CasualConc cannot find the appropriate line in the document when it find more than one instances of the exact concordance line in the same file (you can simply copy/paste the line to find another instance of the same line).

You can also change the height of both the Concordance view and the Context view by moving the narrow bar in-between.  If you just want to look at the Concordance view, uncheck the Context checkbox and lower the bar.

 

Sorting results 

By default, search results are sorted by R1-R2-R3.

You can change the sort order by selecting one of the preset ones.

Alternately, you can sort the result by the order of your preference.  Simply click the radio button next to 1st and select 1st, 2nd, and 3rd sort words.

You can select sort order before the search or resort the result by clicking Resort button.  If you use any particular combination(s) of sort order frequently, please let me know.  If many people use that order, I might add it to the list.

 

Context word 

You can also search the search word that has your choice of context words (no phrases) within a specified range of context by specifying it in the Context Word.  To use this function, check the box next to Context Word and enter the word of your choice.

You can specify the range of the context in Span.

The result only shows the concordance lines that has the specified word(s) in the specified range of the context.  The context word(s) will be underlined.

Copying concordance results 

You can copy selected concordance result and paste it to any text editor/word processor of your choice.  Simple select lines, and go to Menu -> Misc -> Copy Concordance Line.  You can copy multiple lines.  To keep the formatting, select a monotype font (Courier or Courier New) in your text editor or word processor.  This is also available in context menu.

Deleting concordance results 

You can also delete selected concordance line(s) by selecting lines, and going to Menu -> Misc -> Delete Concordance Line.  You can delete multiple lines.  This is also available in context menu.

You will see the following warning when you try to delete lines.

Click Yes to delete lines.  The undo/redo function is still experimental, so they might not work properly (I haven't found a way to properly implement this function, and that is why a warning message shows up), so make sure you select the lines you really want to delete.

Opening search results in a new window

You can open your search results in a new window.  You can open multiple windows to compare results.  To do this, go to Menu -> Misc -> Open Concordance Result in New Window.

A new window with the current results will appear.

You can resort the results on this window.  To close the window, click Close button at the bottom right corner of the window.

Replacing search word(s)/phrase(s) with blanks

For preparing teaching materials, Concord has a couple of experimental features.  One is to replace the search word(s) with blanks and the other is to limit the number of search results.  To set these go to Preferences -> Concord.

To replace the search word with the blanks, check Replace Keyword with and enter the number of blanks (1-byte space character).

You can also select a bracket type.

Limiting search results on the table 

To limit the number of results, check Limit concordance output to and enter the number of lines you want in the result.

If the above settings are applied, here's what you get (the same search word and the corpus above).

You can check how many hit it returned and how many are displayed on the list.