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Basic Find and Replace In Vim, you can find and replace text using the :substitute ( :s ) command. To run commands in Vim, you must be in normal mode, the default mode when starting the editor. To go back to normal mode from any other mode, just press the 'Esc' key.
Change and repeat Search for text using / or for a word using * . In normal mode, type cgn (change the next search hit) then immediately type the replacement. Press Esc to finish. From normal mode, search for the next occurrence that you want to replace ( n ) and press . to repeat the last change.
The % is a shortcut that tells vi to search all lines of the file for search_string and change it to replacement_string . The global ( g ) flag at the end of the command tells vi to continue searching for other occurrences of search_string . To confirm each replacement, add the confirm ( c ) flag after the global flag.
^ * $ \ ? ) have special significance to the search process and must be “escaped” when they are used in a search. To escape a special character, precede it with a backslash ( \ ). For example, to search for the string “anything?” type /anything\? and press Return.
Add the flag c (in the vim command prompt):
:%s/old/new/gc
will give you a yes/no prompt at each occurrence of 'old'.
Vim's built-in help offers useful info on the options available once substitution with confirmation has been selected. Use:
:h :s
Then scroll to section on confirm options. Screenshot below:
![Text that says "[C] Confirm each substitution. [...] CTRL-Y to scroll the screen down"](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hQBJ4.gif)
For instance, to substitute this and all remaining matches, use a.
Mark Biek pointed out using:
%s/old/new/gc
for a global search replace with confirmation for each substitution. But, I also enjoy interactively verifying that the old text will match correctly. I first do a search with a regex, then I reuse that pattern:
/old.pattern.to.match
%s//replacement/gc
The s// will use the last search pattern.
I think you're looking for c, eg s/abc/123/gc, this will cause VIM to confirm the replacements. See :help :substitute for more information.
I usually use the find/substitute/next/repeat command :-)
/old<CR>3snew<ESC>n.n.n.n.n.n.n.
That's find "old", substitute 3 characters for "new", find next, repeat substitute, and so on.
It's a pain for massive substitutions but it lets you selectively ignore some occurrences of old (by just pressing n again to find the next one instead of . to repeat a substitution).
If you just want to count the number of occurrences of 'abc' then you can do %s/abc//gn. This doesn't replace anything but just reports the number of occurrences of 'abc'.
If your replacement text needs to change for each matched occurrence (i.e. not simply choosing Yes/No to apply a singular replacement) you can use a Vim plugin I made called interactive-replace.
Neovim now has a feature to preview the substitution:
Image taken from: https://medium.com/@eric.burel/stop-using-open-source-5cb19baca44d Documentation of the feature: https://neovim.io/doc/user/options.html#'inccommand'
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