Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12Matching Patterns and Literals

In this part of the book, we’ll talk about search, substitute, and global commands. But first, we’ll focus on the core that drives each of them: Vim’s search engine. Have you ever wondered how Vim’s regular expressions work or how to turn them off?

Vim’s regular expression engine may be somewhat different from the one you’re accustomed to using. We’ll see that the most confusing discrepancies can be smoothed out with the very magic pattern switch. Certain characters have a special meaning by default in Vim’s search field, which can complicate matters when we just want to match something verbatim. We’ll learn how to disable all of these special meanings at a stroke, with the very nomagic literal switch. ...