1. This is the same in almost all regex flavors (for historical reasons), so for consistency reasons I think it's better to keep an available "multi-line" option, rather than to make the user wonder, or to go to the documentation to find it out. See also: https://www.regular-expressions.info/dot.html 2. If you want to search just for some non-printing characters like tab or newline, you can just enable the "Use escape sequences" option. 3. If, besides that, you need the full regex capability, you could just enable the "Use multi-line matching" option once and it will remain enabled until you disable it.