Search one word containing # with *

Question

I would like to search the word under my cursor. For this, I tried to press *. But, if the word I want to search is #foo, as an example, vim only searches word foo (without hash), so it fails.

In fact, the # is not considered in the word, which is confirmed when I try to go to the next word with w.

Do you know how I can search effectively #titi by pressing * on my keyboard?

Answer 1

What is considered to be part of a word is defined, I think, by iskeyword. You can try to change this setting to include # and see if it solves your case.

More info: :help 'iskeyword'

Answer 2

You can use a visual selection first to highlight all the text you want to search for, then run your search. If #foo is surrounded by whitespace, it's even easier; you could simply do viW*.

Reference: :help v_star-default

Note: This is Neovim specific does not work in Vim

Answer 3

A solution without changing the iskeyword option or using * would be to put the whole white-space delimited word (see :help WORD) under the cursor with Ctrl-RCtrl-A (see :help c_CTRL-R_CTRL-A) into search, or:

/<C-R><C-A><CR>

Now * (as opposed to g*) also has the nice touch of wrapping the word in boundaries like this \<foo\>. If you want to match #foo but not #foobar, you need to add them yourself:

/\<<C-R><C-A>\><CR>

This is a little more typing than a simple * but not too much (I think) for occasional use.

If you need to search for strings like #foo frequently, I'd suggest creating a mapping like nnoremap <lhs> /\<^R^A\><CR> where <lhs> is the key you want to use and ^R^A is produced by pressing the sequence Ctrl-VCtrl-RCtrl-VCtrl-A.