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The characters for extended regular expressions are invaluable; is there a way to turn them on so that I don't have to escape them in my Vim regex, much like the -E flag I can pass to grep(1)?
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Vim has several regex modes, one of which is very magic that's very similar to traditional regex. Just put \v in the front and you won't have to escape as much.
An extended regular expression specifies a set of strings to be matched. The expression contains both text characters and operator characters. Text characters match the corresponding characters in the strings being compared. Operator characters specify repetitions, choices, and other features.
Grep Regular Expression In its simplest form, when no regular expression type is given, grep interpret search patterns as basic regular expressions. To interpret the pattern as an extended regular expression, use the -E ( or --extended-regexp ) option.
In normal mode, press / to start a search, then type the pattern ( \<i\> ), then press Enter. If you have an example of the word you want to find on screen, you do not need to enter a search pattern. Simply move the cursor anywhere within the word, then press * to search for the next occurrence of that whole word.
Do :help magic in vim and you'll see there are four levels (very magic, magic, nomagic, and very nomagic) but only the two central ones can be set globally (the default is magic, and with :set commands you can only toggle between magic and nomagic); start your RE with \v to make all the rest of it "very magic" ("all ASCII characters except '0'-'9', 'a'-'z', 'A'-'Z' and '_' have a special meaning") -- but that applies only to that one specific RE!-)
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