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For years I unknowingly used some, shall we say, deviant distribution of vim that would stay at the location of the highlighted search result after hitting <Esc> in the middle of a search instead of jumping back to the original position.

I've tried for more than a year now to forget that muscle memory, but I cannot for the life of me stop pressing <Esc> once what I've typed in the search has taken me to the position I'm searching for.

Does anyone know a) how I can get that behavior back, b) what *nix distribution had a copy of vim that defaulted to this behavior?

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    If you use enter instead of esc it should work out of the box.
    – Christian Brabandt
    Jul 20, 2017 at 22:44
  • @ChristianBrabandt like I said, I've tried teaching myself to do that. Muscle memory.
    – Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
    Jul 20, 2017 at 22:45
  • This should just be the default behaviour (like it is in most modern editors). Vim has a selection history – that's the perfect system to use to go back to your previous selection after searching.
    – iono
    Sep 26, 2019 at 11:22

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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There is an option for this: set cpoptions+=x

From :help cpo-x

    x   <Esc> on the command-line executes the command-line.
        The default in Vim is to abandon the command-line,
        because <Esc> normally aborts a command.  |c_<Esc>|

It is also the default vim behavior when compatible is set, and is the behavior of vi in distributions that ship the "real thing," such as Arch Linux.

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  • That might indeed be it. And since I never use <ESC> to abandon the command line (ctrl+c only), this would probably fit the bill!
    – Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
    Sep 19, 2017 at 2:29
  • Oof, this is good answer but, by god, is it some bad UI design! That's a serious betrayal of how <Esc> works in pretty much every single program. It's even in the name of the damn key - "escape"!
    – iono
    Sep 26, 2019 at 11:20
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    @iono, worth pointing out <esc> is also how you leave insert mode, i.e. "commit" the text edit, so by that it isn't too surprising
    – Mass
    Sep 26, 2019 at 19:22
  • @Mass thanks, that's interesting to learn! I was assuming Vim was writing to the buffer with every change in insert mode. I've just been hitting <esc>z, which is handy anyway as it preserves the "mistake" in the edit timeline just in case it wasn't actually a mistake.
    – iono
    Feb 3, 2021 at 6:49
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I don't think you can configure this in VIM (see help incsearch) but

https://github.com/haya14busa/incsearch.vim

may be an option (if it's not already included you could ask for or implement that feature).

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  • I already use it :(
    – Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
    Jul 20, 2017 at 22:45
  • Why don't you open an issue or PR?
    – laktak
    Jul 21, 2017 at 10:28

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