Find and Replace in Vim

From https://linuxize.com/post/vim-find-replace/

Basic Find and Replace

In Vim you use :substitute (:s) command.

:[range]s/{pattern}/{string}/[flags] [count]

If no [range] and [count] are given, only the pattern found in the current line is replace.

If you want to replace all occurrences of foo with bar:

:%s/foo/bar/g

The % is for the entire file and g would be all occurrences. The / can be replaced with any non-alphanumeric single-byte character as a delimiter. This is useful if you are replacing /.

Case Sensitivity

By default the search is case sensitive so include i to make it ignore the case.

:s/Foo/bar/gi

Search Range

To search for certain line ranges, include the line numbers:

:3,10s/foo/bar/g

This will be for lines 3 to 10 (this is inclusive).

To make changes from the current line to the end of the file using . and $.

:.,$/foo/bar/

Finally you can use + and - to denote the number of rows above or below a certain line. If no [range] and [count] are given, only the pattern found in the current line is replace.

If you want to replace all occurrences of foo with bar:

:%s/foo/bar/g

The % is for the entire file and g would be all occurrences. The / can be replaced with any non-alphanumeric single-byte character as a delimiter. This is useful if you are replacing /.

Case Sensitivity

By default the search is case sensitive so include i to make it ignore the case.

:s/Foo/bar/gi

Search Range

To search for certain line ranges, include the line numbers:

:3,10s/foo/bar/g

This will be for lines 3 to 10 (this is inclusive).

To make changes from the current line to the end of the file using . and $.

:.,$/foo/bar/

Finally you can use + and - to denote the number of rows above or below a certain line.

:.,+4s/foo/bar/g

Substituting Whole Word

To only replace the whole word and not portions, type \< to mark the beginning of a word and \> to mark the end of a word.

:s/\<foo\>/bar/