title: How to match the start of a line using a Visual Studio Code regex?
body: <p>I'm trying to perform a simple operation: take a file and put "> " at the front of every line. However, when I try to use Visual Studio Code to do it, the regular expression "^" doesn't match all the lines. In particular, it matches:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>blank lines </li>
  <li>lines starting with "-", "{" or " "
  but not</li>
  <li>lines starting with a letter</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>This makes no sense to me, I'm told it uses Rust's regular expression engine but I can't see anything in the documentation that would suggest this would happen.</p>
  
  <p>Why does this happen and how do I fix it?</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/RRXfS.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/RRXfS.png" alt="well this isn&#39;t ideal"></a></p>
  
  <p>This is what happens if I try "^.".</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/f8SHG.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/f8SHG.png" alt="^."></a></p>