How to Search in Vim / Vi

The basic steps to perform a search in Vim are as follows:

1. Press / .
2. Type the search pattern.
3. Press Enter to perform the search.
4. Press n to find the next occurrence or N to find the previous occurrence.

1. How do you search for something in vi?
2. How do I search multiple words in vi?
3. How do you Ctrl F in Vim?
4. How do you search for exact words in Vim?
5. How do I move in vi?
6. How do you use vi?
7. How do you highlight words in Vim?
8. How do I save and quit in Vim?
9. How do I select a word in vi editor?
10. What is Ctrl U in Vim?
11. What does Ctrl B do in Vim?
12. How do I stop vim searching?

How do you search for something in vi?

To find a character string, type / followed by the string you want to search for, and then press Return. vi positions the cursor at the next occurrence of the string. For example, to find the string “meta,” type /meta followed by Return. Type n to go to the next occurrence of the string.

How do I search multiple words in vi?

There are two simple ways to highlight multiple words in vim editor.

1. Go to search mode i.e. type '/' and then type \v followed by the words you want to search separated by '|' (pipe). E.g.: /\vword1|word2|word3.
2. Go to search mode and type the words you want to search separated by '\|'. E.g.: /word1\|word2\|word3.

How do you Ctrl F in Vim?

Basic searching

In normal mode you can search forwards by pressing / (or <kDivide> ) then typing your search pattern. Press Esc to cancel or press Enter to perform the search.

How do you search for exact words in Vim?

Text Search

Another way to find an exact word is to place the cursor on a word, enter command mode, and type an asterisk to find more occurrences of that word. Again, use n and N to repeat the search.

How do I move in vi?

When you start vi , the cursor is in the upper left corner of the vi screen. In command mode, you can move the cursor with a number of keyboard commands.
...
Moving With Arrow Keys

1. To move left, press h .
2. To move right, press l .
3. To move down, press j .
4. To move up, press k .

How do you use vi?

The vi editor has two modes: Command and Insert. When you first open a file with vi, you are in Command mode. Command mode means that you can use keyboard keys to navigate, delete, copy, paste, and do a number of other tasks—except entering text. To enter Insert mode, press i .

How do you highlight words in Vim?

Usage

1. Press 1 to highlight the current visually selected text, or the current word (if nothing is selected). Highlight group hl1 is used.
2. Press 2 for highlight hl2 , 3 for highlight hl3 , etc.
3. Press 0 to remove all highlights from the current visually selected text, or the current word.

How do I save and quit in Vim?

Want to save your changes and exit? Press the esc key, then type :wq , which means w rite and q uit. Want to exit without saving changes? Press the esc key, then type :q!

How do I select a word in vi editor?

Position the cursor at the beginning of the text you want to cut/copy. Press v to begin character-based visual selection, or V to select whole lines, or Ctrl-v or Ctrl-q to select a block. Move the cursor to the end of the text to be cut/copied.

What is Ctrl U in Vim?

In insert mode, pressing Ctrl-u deletes text you've typed in the current line, and Ctrl-w deletes the word before the cursor. You can't undo these deletions.

What does Ctrl B do in Vim?

Normally when one presses CTRL B , the visible buffer scrolls up by one page and the cursor jumps up by the same amount of lines. Near the top of a file, though, the visible buffer jumps to the beginnining of the file and the cursor is set to the last visible line.

How do I stop vim searching?

or :nohlsearch to temporarily disable search highlighting until the next search. Thus, after your search, just hit return again in command mode, and the highlighting disappears. The second line is needed for mapping to the escape key since Vim internally uses escape to represent special keys.