Select multiple words, one at a time, then replace them all

Question

Goal: Select multiple words, one at a time, then replace them all.

I'm new to Vim; I come from Visual Studio. I would like to achieve one important feature that helped me a lot in my productivity: Select multiple words, one at a time, and then replace them all.

I know there is a Vim way of replacing using:

:% s/target-word/replacement/gc

But as you can see it's still a lot to write compared to its counterpart in VS Code. Could someone help me with a vim script or a plugin to achieve this in the most similar way?

• imagine that I already have selected the word with viw, for example.
• then I want to have a single command to select the next match.
• then start writing and see those changes written in real-time or after hitting Esc.

[Edit] Accepted answer

Thanks D. Ben Knoble; you provided to me the more convenient and practical answer. As the main goal is to change a word locally, the combination *cgn Is perfect.

As I'm changing the also the current word and * jumps me to the next match, what I add to go back to that word is Ctrl + N.

* Ctrl + N cgn then .

Answer 1

I’m assuming all the things to change are the same. If not, I would probably proceed with either multiples of the steps below, or combine all the patterns into a single substitute pattern.

So, not really what you asked for, but:

*cgn

Breakdown:

• *: start a search for the word under the cursor (g* if you don’t want the word boundaries)
• cchange
• gn the next match

So you put your cursor somewhere in a word, press *cgn, type the replacement, hit <esc>, and then hit . to change the next occurence.

If you already searched for the word, ignore the * and just cgn.

These are somewhat equivalent to

%substitute/\<<C-r>=expand('<cword>')<cr>\>/replacement/gc

and

%substitute//replacement/gc

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If you want to do this with a visually-selected pattern, I would yank it, followed by

%substitute/<C-r>"//replacement/gc

(Add word boundaries \<\> as needed)

---

If you want to substitute in a narrower region, than the whole file (%), use ranges (and remember that in visual mode, : automatically populates the range '<,'>, which is also the range *, which is all the lines in the selection). These can be quite powerful, and a full overview is out-of-scope (:help [range]).

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A slightly more advanced option: do a search (:grep, :vimgrep, &c.) or some other operation that fills the quickfix list (:cexpr, :make) and then

cdo substitute/pat/repl/flags

Or :cfdo %substitute if you know you want the whole of each file.

Don’t forget to :cfdo update or just :wall afterwards.

---

There do exist multi-cursor-emulation plugins for vim. I can’t recommend any, never having used them, but they are out there.

Really, though, learning how to use commands like :substitute, :global, ., operators like c, d, and all the other motions and such can be, in the long term, more efficient. It does require breaking some learned habits and thought-processes, however, and it’s not for everyone. Fear not. You can make vim whatever you want.

Answer 2

One way would be to press * when your cursor is on the word you want to replace, phrase in this case, which will search for that word (very useful in general!) It will use \<phrase\> as the pattern: the \> are word boundaries (similar to \b in Perl-style regexps) so that it won't match phrases.

You can then use :%s//sentence/g; to replace phrase with sentence. If you omit the search pattern in :s then it will automatically use the current search pattern. I find that this is generally a more convenient way to do search previews than the /c flag: search for something: verify it matches what you want, and use :s//replace.

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The current search pattern is stored in the @/ register, which is a variable you can read and write; for example if you want to use phrase without the word boundaries:

:echo @/
\<phrase\>

:let @/ = 'phrase'
:echo @/
phrase

:%s//sentence

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This isn't exactly the live preview you asked for, which is something Vim doesn't really have right now. I find this is a reasonably efficient workflow. Generally speaking Vim isn't too good at these kind of live preview things and such; even the live search when you use / is actually fairly new and was added 3 years ago.

In NeoVim you can use :set inccommand=nosplit to show a preview in a split window, but this isn't in Vim yet. I can't really find an issue for it on the Vim tracker right now. I'm fairly sure I saw a plugin for this once, but I can't find that right now either 😅

Answer 3

There are Vim plug-ins that emulate the "multiple cursors" feature from other editors such as Sublime or VS Code, for example, mg979/vim-visual-multi (successor to the now deprecated terryma/vim-multiple-cursors.)

But since these plug-ins need to use Vim highlighting features to emulate multiple selections and they typically need to re-implement many Vim native movements, they are often limited in what they can do and they can be a little buggy.

There are many other Vim plug-ins implementing search and replace features. While they might not be as visually straightforward as the "multiple cursors" feature, they often work better in Vim. Some examples are:

• dyng/ctrlsf.vim
• dkprice/vim-easygrep
• wincent/ferret

And many others. As it's often the case with Vim, there are tradeoffs with each choice, some will be better in specific situations, some will be more general. While you can get a lot done in terms of search and replace with built-in features of Vim, if you do consider adding external plug-ins, consider evaluating the ones in this list. A web search for "vim search and replace" will also point you at many more.

Answer 4

You can watch in one minute.how is it work and what is shortcut for this.

https://youtube.com/shorts/dqQQ46w5tkI?si=ETMVFlMfUXCMq9Bw