Mastering Vim

Very magic

Very magic mode treats every character apart from letters, numbers, and underscores as a special character.

You can set very magic mode for a command by prefixing your regex strings with \v (for example, /\vfoo or :s/\vfoo/bar).

Very magic mode is often used when many special characters are to be used. For instance, we used the following example to replace cat hunting mice with mice hunting cat:

:s/\(cat\) hunting \(mice\)/\2 hunting \1

In very magic mode, this can be rewritten as follows:

:s/\v(cat) hunting (mice)/\2 hunting \1