There are many products supporting the FIND command with a syntax similar to the one provided in ISPF EDIT. Typically other products do not support all the functionality that EDIT FIND does. Common to most of the other products is that they have implemented some sort of FIND limit in order to prevent a scan of all records in the data you are searching in. I think the FIND limit is quite annoying, because many installations nowadays processes rather large amounts of data, but the implemented FIND limits have not changed accordingly.

I have discovered a little loophole in all the products with FIND limits I work with. For example if I need to find the first occurence of the text 2010-06-14 I use the command FIND 2010-06-14 ALL instead of FIND 2010-06-14 FIRST. The result in both cases is that the cursor is placed on the first occurence of the string I am searching for, but I do not need to press F5 repeatedly in order to get there. The side effect is of course that FIND ALL scans all records in data before it places the cursor on the first occurence, so using FIND ALL may take a long time and consume a lot of CPU.

If you know that the text you are searcing for is placed at the bottom of data then use a FIND LAST instead and if the text is located in the beginning according to your knowledge then use FIND FIRST. If you know that the text is located in a certain position then specify it, because it makes FIND save a lot of CPU and you get your reply faster. And maybe the products you are using does not support FIND ALL. I know that SDSF, SYSVIEW and SAVERS do.