Changing all applications of material A to use material B

The materials table in the model is growing beyond limits! I don’t know how I make the same material occur multiple times, but it happens all the time; that makes it hard to maintain the materials. Second: I often wish to change use of one material to another one.

I was hoping to ‘Select’ all uses of a material, and then re-paint them en bloc, in one operation, with a new material. Or, as an alternative: When I delete a material, SU asks me if I want to replace it with the default material - No, I want to replace it with one other specific material, not the default one.

It should be as simple as Select on a given material and then cick on another material, but I can’t make it work. Is there some secret trick, or some other way of doing it, or can’t it be done?

When a feature is not native to SketchUp, go looking for extensions: