Copying from vim search term

Question

I'm trying to copy text from my vim search term. I spend a fair bit of time building regular expressions for sed search&replace. Since my regex is often quite complicated, I like to build it up in a search before executing :%s/regex/new text/g

In a terminal vim, I can copy my new regex from the search line using the mouse. I'd like to use gvim as much as possible, but it doesn't let right mouse clicks through for me to copy.

Any ideas how to get the search term into a buffer?

Thanks,

Andrew

Answer 1

In command mode (where you are when you hit : in normal mode), you can do ctrl-R /, which will expand to your last search term (other ctrl-R favorites are " for your yank buffer, or % for the full path of the current window)

You actually don't need to do that though. If you leave out the search term for :s, it will assume you want to use the last thing you searched for. so you can /searchregex, and then right after do :%s//replaceregex/ and it will use search regex to do the replace.

Answer 2

Use q: to open an editable window containing your commandline history. From there you can use all your usual Vim toolset to copy/paste/etc.

For the equivalent feature regarding search history, type q/.