Being able to search for complicated patterns quickly is an indispensable skill as a developer. I want to share some tips to use Vim's search to speed up your development. When used correctly, search can be a powerful navigation tool in Vim.

I hope you'll learn one or two things!

happy fast typing

Searching in Vim

You can search using /{your-search-pattern}. Go backwards with ?{your-search-pattern}. To search for all foo in a file, do /foo.

Finding next/ previous instance

Once you enter your search pattern /foo, pressing Enter (<CR>) will put you into what I call "search mode". You can find next instance of "foo" by n and previous instance of "foo" by N.

One super convenient thing about n is that you can do it anytime even when you are not in search mode anymore, invoke that search again by typing n. Try it.

I think this is a powerful navigation tool in vim because you can quickly go up/down file with precision.

Turn on ignorecase and smartcase

I find it easier to search in case insensitive mode. To do that, in my vimrc I have set ignorecase. With ignorecase, typing /foo will match "foo", "Foo", "FOO", etc.

I also have smartcase on (set smartcase). These two usually go together.

What ignore + smartcase combo do, is that it will do case insensitive search only if we use all lowercase search. It will do case sensitive search if we use at least one uppercase.

For example:

foo
Foo
FoO

Searching /foo will match all of the above. Searching /Foo will match only "Foo". Searching /fOo will find no match.

The former is case insensitive, the last two were case sensitive. A little weird, but I find it delightfully intuitive.

Disabling highlight

After finding matches, sometimes I found the highlighted matches distracting. You can turn it off with :noh (no highlight). Because I use this often, I mapped :noh to <esc><esc>.

Here is what I have in .vimrc:

nnoremap <esc><esc> :noh<return><esc>

Auto complete searching

Vim is smart enough to autocomplete your search keyword. While you are searching for "something", you can autocomplete with /somet<C-r><C-w> gives /something.

It is not foolproof, but I found 90% of the time it gives me the word I was thinking of.

Repeating last search

To repeat last search, you can do either / or //.

Finding word frequency

To see how many "foo" occurs in a file, you can type :%s/foo//gn.

It uses substitute (:s) command, for the whole file (%) but we suppresses it (n) (I think you can just use :%s/{word}//n without g.

We can combine this with //. If we had just searched for foo (/foo) and we wanted to find how many "foo" in current file, we can do :%s///gn.

Quickly find all word instances under cursor

There are two ways to find a word under cursor:

To find within word boundary, use * or #
To find without word boundary, use g* or g#.

I didn't get word boundaries at first, so let me explain:

[H]ello // [H] means cursor is on H
HelloWorld
Hello
Helloworld

If we use *, we will see

[Hello] //highlights
HelloWorld
[Hello] //highlights
Helloworld

If we use g*, we will see

[Hello] //highlights
[Hello]World //highlights
[Hello] //highlights
[Hello]world //highlights

Use n or N to jump to next/ previous instance.

That's all for now. I hope you guys find this helpful. Please feel free to share other searching tips - I am curious to hear from you guys.

Happy hacking!!

Quick tips for searching in vim