Vim – yank into search register

editorvivim

Is there any easy/quick way to "yank" into vim's "last search" register ("/)?

From the vim documentation, it appears that the answer is no, but that it can be assigned via a "let" command:

It is writable with ":let", you can change it to have 'hlsearch' highlight
other matches without actually searching.  You can't yank or delete into this
register.

Ideally what I'd like to do is something like:

"/5yw

which would yank the next 5 words under the cursor & put them in the last search buffer

Alternatively, if there is a way to search for the contents of a named register, that would work too. In other words, if I could do:

"A5yw

and then search for what is in register A, that would work too.

The closest I can come is to yank into a named register & then copy that register into the last search register, e.g.

"A5yw
:let @/=@A

At the risk of making a long question longer, I want to state that it's not always 5 words I'd like to "yank & search" — sometimes it's 17 characters, sometimes it's to the end of the line, etc… so a hard-coded macro doesn't give me the flexibility I'd want.

Best Answer

After pressing / to enter a search string, you can then use Ctrl-R and then type the letter representing the register that you want to use.

eg.

First, "Ayw to yank a word into register A
Then, / ^R A to put the contents of register A into the search string.

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

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How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

Use \r instead of \n.

Related Topic

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.