Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 83

Offset the Cursor to the End of a Search Match

A search offset can be used to position the cursor a fixed number of characters away from the start or end of a match. In this tip, we’ll study an example where, by placing the cursor at the end of a match, we’re able to complete a series of changes using the Dot Formula.

Each time we execute a search command, our cursor is positioned on the first character of the match. This default seems reasonable, but sometimes we might rather have the cursor positioned at the end of a search match. Vim makes this possible using its search offset feature (see search-offsetⓘ).

Let’s study an example. In this excerpt, the author has consistently abbreviated the word “language”:

search/langs.txt

Aim ...