How to Vim: Alternative Approach to Find and Replace

The classic way to do “find and replace” in Vim is pretty well known:

:%s/target/replacement/gc

This will replace all instances of target in the current buffer (that’s what the % is about) with target. The c flag means you’ll get prompted for confirmation for every replacement. Not bad, right?

Still, often you need to replace just a few instances of something, so the above might be a bit too much typing. Imagine you’re dealing with the following text:

foo bar
foo baz
foo bar

If you want to replace the bar instances with baz the fastest way to do this would be something like:

• /bar - this will take you to the beginning of bar
• cwbaz - this will replace bar with baz
• n. - this will take you to the next match and repeat the last edit you did

Pretty sweet and quite interactive in my opinion. It also allows you easily skip matches you don’t want to replace. And there are a few other tricks you can keep in mind:

• You can use * to select the word under the cursor and start a search with it
• If you’re searching for something more complex (e.g. it has multiple words) you can use cgn instead of cw. gn means the next search match.

So, there you have it - another way to do “find and replace” in Vim! Keep hacking!