Practical Vim

Chapter 13Search

Having studied Vim’s regular expression engines in the previous chapter, let’s see how we can put them to use with the search command. We’ll start with the basics: how to execute a search, highlight matches, and jump between them. Then we’ll learn a couple of tricks that exploit Vim’s incremental search feature, which not only gives us instant feedback but can also save us typing by autocompleting our match. We’ll also learn how to count the number of matches that occur in a document.

The search offsets feature allows us to position our cursor relative to a match. We’ll look at one scenario where search offsets can streamline our workflow. Then we’ll see how search offsets can be exploited to operate on a complete search ...