Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 84

Operate on a Complete Search Match

Vim’s search command allows us to highlight matches and jump between them quickly. We can also operate on regions of text that match our current pattern using the gn command.

Vim’s search command is convenient for jumping between occurrences of a pattern, but what if we want to make a change to each match? This used to be awkward, but the gn command (available since Vim 7.4.110) offers a very efficient workflow for operating on search matches.

Let’s look at an example. In this excerpt, we’re dealing with classes called XmlDocument, XhtmlDocument, XmlTag, and XhtmlTag:

search/tag-heirarchy.rb

class XhtmlDocument < XmlDocument; end
class XhtmlTag < XmlTag; end

Suppose we want to rename each ...