Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 33

Insert the Current Word at the Command Prompt

Even in Command-Line mode, Vim always knows where the cursor is positioned and which split window is active. To save time, we can insert the current word (or WORD) from the active document onto our command prompt.

At Vim’s command line, the <C-r><C-w> mapping copies the word under the cursor and inserts it at the command-line prompt. We can use this to save ourselves a bit of typing.

Suppose that we want to rename the tally variable in this excerpt to counter:

cmdline_mode/loop.js

var tally;
for (tally=1; tally <= 10; tally++) {
  // do something with tally
};

With our cursor positioned on the word tally, we could use the * command to search for each occurrence. (The * command ...