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Suppose that I have marks 'a and 'b, and I want to search for all occurrences of foo between them.

The ex command

:'a,'bs/foo/bar

will replace only between 'a and 'b. Is there any command like

:'a,'b/foo

that will find foo only between those two marks? (That exact syntax does something, but I can't figure out what. It doesn't seem to be what I want.)

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2 Answers 2

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You can use \%>'m and \%<'m to match after and before a given mark, m.

/\%>'afoo\%<'b

For more helps see:

:h /\%'m
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  • Thank you! And then some more characters.
    – LSpice
    Commented Mar 15, 2018 at 18:06
  • Do you know what my imaginary syntax :'a,'b/foo is doing? The effect that I observe is that I jump to some other part of the document, way outside the mark-delimited region, but I can't figure out why I'm going there.
    – LSpice
    Commented Mar 15, 2018 at 18:08
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    'a,'b is a range. So you can actually type this out as it to see what it does: :'a,'b. It will move to the 'b position as that is the end of the range. You then execute a command, e.g. /. So it searches for foo after line 'b. For more help see :h :range
    – Peter Rincker
    Commented Mar 15, 2018 at 18:11
  • Ah, I didn't realise that I was inadvertently concatenating two commands. Thanks!
    – LSpice
    Commented Mar 15, 2018 at 18:40
  • @LSpice, see if you can learn how this one works: :'a,'b/hello/d "delete from the line of mark a through the first line containing the word hello after the line of mark b"
    – Mass
    Commented Mar 15, 2018 at 19:17
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FWIW: :'a,'bs/foo//n substitute foo with nothing and choose 'no' when asked for the replacement. afterwards just hit the next (n) to get to the next occurrence.

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  • Thanks! It's not the spirit of what I wanted, but it's an interesting approach.
    – LSpice
    Commented Feb 4, 2021 at 18:25
  • I also use it to count number of occurrences in the buffer: %s/foo//n
    – Ran Regev
    Commented Feb 5, 2021 at 20:39
  • Re, how do you extract the count (or do you just tally it manually)?
    – LSpice
    Commented Jun 21, 2022 at 13:53
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    e.g. When you have 24 foo in your buffer, the command %s/foo//n outputs the answer: 24 matches on 24 lines.
    – Ran Regev
    Commented Jun 22, 2022 at 18:24
  • I was overthinking that! Thanks!
    – LSpice
    Commented Jun 22, 2022 at 20:32

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