Global Search in VIM

Feb 11, 2014 · Comments
code bashvim

You must be knowing about regular VIM search

%s/SEARCH/REPLACE/CMD

However, sometimes you do not want to replace something but just see all instances of the a word or phrase. In such cases, global search is really useful when on vim. The syntax is simpler than normal search-replace:

:[range]g[lobal]/{pattern}/[cmd]

This will show all instances of the “SEARCH” term within the VIM window. There’s another version of the same command which is as follows:

:[range]g[lobal]!/{pattern}/[cmd]

This is similar to the previous command but the only difference is that this command contains “!” which signifies that the command will be executed on all lines NOT matching the pattern.

One example here would be to delete all lines in a file containing a particular word:

:g/deleteMe/d

There could be lot more actions (regular vim stuff) that you could do like yanking or indenting.