How do I edit the search text in vim?

Question

I've searched online for this a while, but I couldn't find an answer.

What I want to do is to edit the previously entered search text in vim.

For example, say I just searched for "FooClass". Then I want to search for "FooMethod", but rather than typing the whole word from scratch, I would like to backspace 5 times to remove "Class", and just type "Method" after "Foo".

Thanks!

Answer 1

Press / then Up, then backspace five times. (Probably assumes nocp is set).

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Stop reading now unless you want to learn some fancy new tricks...

If you want to get clever, you can also use Ctrl-R to pull things onto the search box (e.g. put the cursor on a word, press /, then press and hold Ctrl and press R then W and it will pull the word under the cursor onto the search line: similar to pressing *, but editable and without the word boundaries).

If you want to get really clever, you can use all of vimscript's cleverness to set @/ to be whatever you want to search for and then press n:

:let @/ = 'Foo' . 'Method'
n

Probably more than you wanted to know though...

See:

:help 'nocp'
:help c_CTRL-R
:help c_CTRL-R_CTRL-W
:help *
:help quote/
:help :let-@