Easy way of entering common codes in Find and Replace dialog

The Find and Replace dialog should make it easy to enter the most frequently used codes, such as bold, italics, hard return, hard page, tab, indent, etc. There is surely a way in which such codes could be entered directly with their own keys without triggering the commands associated with them. In other words, pressing the Tab key in such a context would not move the cursor to the next entry in the dialog. If I remember correctly, this was possible in WordPerfect for DOS 6.0.