Easy find and replace is one of those quality of life improvements that make Vim great. With one quick command, and a little regex, you can replace a pattern across an entire file. Here’s how:
Find and replace in the entire file with Vim:%s
This is my most-used version of Vim find and replace. :%s will find and replace a pattern across the entire file being edited. The command is formatted like this:
:%s/match/replacement/.
It’ll take anything in your file which matches the match pattern, and replace it with replacement.
For example, here’s a screenshot of some identifying strings I need to reformat:
With %s, we can remove all of those prefixes with one quick command:
This is the exact command I used: :%s/\w.+_//g. Let’s break it down:
:%s– this is the Vim command for find and replace on all lines./\w.+_/– this is the matcher expression. It says “find a word character, followed by any number of anything else followed by an underscore “_”. Not very specific, but good enough for this job.//– between these two slashes is what to replace with. In this case it’s empty because I want to delete.g– Global flag. This makes sure the replacement affects multiple occurrences on the same line. By default, this command only changes the first instance on each line.
Important note: Pure Vim tends to interpret regex characters literally, so you may have to escape regex quantifiers. Meaning: instead of using + in your pattern you might need \+. So the full pattern above would become /\w.\+_/.
I ran this pattern (/\w.+_/) in pure Vim and again in VS Code with Vim emulation—pure Vim did require additional escaping, VS Code did not.
Find and replace with Vim :s
This works just like the :%s command, but :s will only replace on your current line.
That’s about it for the basics. For a lot more detail, like how to search specific line ranges, check out this detailed post.
Helpful Links
- This Stackoverflow answer which taught me about Vim’s
magicsetting, responsible for how it interprets Regex patterns