Performing searches
Need to search your code for a particular word or pattern? Use the / operator, followed by the search string:
/string to search for
ViM will now take you to the next match for your search string. To move forward progressively through the list of matches, keep tapping n .
To search backwards, use the ? operator instead, as in:
?john
If the word you're searching for is already under the cursor, save yourself some typing by using another well-known shortcut. Place the cursor under the search word and type the asterisk (*). ViM will jump to the next match for that word.
You can use the
:set ignorecase
option if you want ViM to perform case-insensitive matching. Also, I like to use the
:set hlsearch
option as well for my searches. This automatically highlights all the matches to the search string in the document, and it's really useful when you're doing things like looking for "all calls to my function hamandeggs(), which I've now decided to change to jamandfigs()".
Tip - Remember that you can use regular expressions in your search strings as well.
Now that you know how to search, let's take a look at how to replace text and how to store your favorite settings.
Performing substitutions
A common programming task involves performing substitutions in a script—for example, correcting a variable name. For such tasks, ViM offers a very powerful substitution command. Here's an example that replaces all occurrences of the variable colour with color on the current line:
:s/colour/color/gi
The g flag ensures that all occurrences on the current line are replaced (without it, only the first occurrence would be replaced), while the i flag performs a case-insensitive search.
You can have ViM confirm each substitution by adding a c flag:
:s/colour/color/gic
Most often, though, you won't want to replace on just a single line. After all, you can do that manually. Instead, you'll usually want to perform a search-and-replace operation across the entire file. The true power of ViM thus becomes evident when you add a range to the previous command, like this:
:1,$s/colour/color/gi
This tells ViM to search and replace across the entire file, from lines 1 (beginning) to $ (end). You can obviously use custom page ranges as well.
Comparing files
In case you need to compare two or more scripts to see what's changed between them, you can use ViM's built-in diff command to view the differences. To do this, start ViM with the -d option, followed by the files to be compared:
$ vim -d expenses.c expenses-old.c
In this mode, ViM starts up with each file occupying a separate vertical window. The differences between the two files are highlighted in different colors (if your terminal supports it) or with marks (if it doesn't). It's possible to switch between windows using the standard window-tab shortcuts discussed earlier.
If you're editing both files simultaneously, two interesting commands exist to make your life simpler. Type
:diffupdate
at any point to recompare the files and update the windows with the latest differences, and type
:set scrollbind
to have the two windows scroll in unison (extremely useful if you're comparing two versions of the same file!).
(Re)storing ViM settings
An interesting yet often overlooked feature of ViM lies in its ability to import custom settings from the file being edited. Typically, you'd use this feature to override the global or personal ViM settings (in vimrc files) with settings that are optimized for editing a particular file.
Therefore, you could automatically turn on auto-indenting for C files, or set a custom color scheme for CGI scripts, simply by appending the appropriate variables to the bottom of the file in what are known as modelines .
Here's how such a settings line might look:
vim:tw=10:autoindent:
Important: Note the space at the beginning of the line!
If the raw code above will break your script interpreter, you can use the following alternative syntax, which encloses the ViM modeline in comments so that it's ignored by the parser:
/* vim: set autoindent tw=10: */
In order to tell ViM to read the custom settings when the file is opened for editing, you must turn on modeline parsing by typing
:set modeline
in ViM, or by adding it to the ViM startup configuration files.