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In text editors like sublime text, atom and notepad++, when you select a word, all matches are highlighted automatically as shown in the following screenshot of my atom editor:
I use v and select text in vim but how can I obtain all highlight functionality?
* and # with hlsearchYou could highlight by using match and <cword> via an autocommand on an event like CursorHold. But I’m going to show an alternative method.
* searches forward for the word under the cursor# searches backward for the word under the cursorBoth have variants (g*, g#) that don’t restrict the searches to word-boundaries.
Use n and N to navigate.
By setting hlsearch, these searches will also highlight matches.
gd, among others)This is does not work for “partial words”: if you visually-select part of a word and hit *, you won’t get the result you want.
One workaround is one of the many visual star plugins.
Another is to simply yank y and then search /<C-r>"<CR> (vim notation: type slash / to search, then Control-R quote to paste the selected text, then hit enter).
<enter> it highlights all matches (with hlsearch) and n and p go to them.
D. Ben Knoble's answer provides the correct features to look into. Here's a solution that takes that knowledge and gives you some easy key mappings.
First, here's how regular * works with hlsearch enabled (see Ben Knoble's answer for that):
Now the new feature that we will create will do the following. In the next recording, we select some text with VISUAL mode, then hit the enter key and it will highlight all matches, like so:
It is also useful for selecting whole lines and finding matching lines! In the next recording I pressed capital V (shift+v) to enter VISUAL LINE mode and select the current line, then I hit the enter key, and it highlighted all three identical lines:
Nifty!
Note, because this hooks into vim's built-in search feature, you can use n and p to navigate to the next/previous matches just like with * or # search.
To have this functionality, add this mapping to your .vimrc (or init.vim in neovim):
" highlight the visual selection after pressing enter.
xnoremap <silent> <cr> "*y:silent! let searchTerm = '\V'.substitute(escape(@*, '\/'), "\n", '\\n', "g") <bar> let @/ = searchTerm <bar> echo '/'.@/ <bar> call histadd("search", searchTerm) <bar> set hls<cr>
When you have text selected, this mapping will programmatically add the selected text as the last thing you search for (same as if you had used the / key and inputted in manually).
If you have hlsearch enabled, the new search text will be highlighted.
I like to toggle the search highlight, so I made ctrl+c toggle it in NORMAL mode (otherwise ctrl+c does not do anything in NORMAL mode, so now ctrl+c will be useful).
When I press ctrl+c repeatedly, it toggles hlsearch:
The mapping for that is:
" Give ctrl+c a job when it is otherwise being wasted!
" Now it toggles `hlsearch` while in NORMAL mode:
nnoremap <silent> <c-c> :if (&hlsearch == 1) \| set nohlsearch \| else \| set hlsearch \| endif<cr>
The * and # will move your cursor, which you may not like. A lot of the time I would like to see matches, but without the cursor moving. So I mapped the <enter> key in NORMAL mode to search for the current word (very much like *) but without the cursor jumping.
This is what it looks like when I move to a word, and hit the enter key:
Notice the cursor stayed where it was! In my example, the on instances are close to each other, but if they were far apart, it could be annoying if the whole screen jumped to a new location when I didn't want it to.
And here's the mapping!
" Put <enter> to work too! Otherwise <enter> moves to the next line, which we can
" already do by pressing the <j> key, which is a waste of keys!
" Be useful <enter> key!:
nnoremap <silent> <cr> :let searchTerm = '\v<'.expand("<cword>").'>' <bar> let @/ = searchTerm <bar> echo '/'.@/ <bar> call histadd("search", searchTerm) <bar> set hls<cr>
You can run Neovim inside VS Code with the Neo Vim extension. This runs neovim in the background, and you can use the above features right inside VS Code, and also take advantage of all of VS Code's other GUI features.
For example, in the next recording, I selected a line with capital V, and highlighted the matching identical lines with enter, and finally navigated to them with n:
Notice the VS Code GUI including the minimap! With VS Code you'll also have the nice intellisense tooltips with markdown rendering, git GUI, and everything else (many extensions).
Ironically, also notice VS Code's own highlighting (in blue) of the word that is under the cursor! That feature is the whole reason this StackOverflow exists! But now you can do even more with it than just visual matches (navigate to them, and more than just words).
Vim and Neovim are really powerful once you learn them, and especially learn how to script them. They can do so much more with scripting. (And even more with VS Code features in the mix!).
Hope that helps!
set hlsearch!
*N trick won't work, because it may move the scroll position, that was the first thing I tried, whereas mine will never move the scroll position (that's what I want).
My SearchHighlighting plugin is one of those "visual star" plugins that @D.BenKnoble mentions in his answer; it also has a command that does exactly what you're asking for:
:SearchAutoHighlighting selection
I wrote a little plugin many years ago, and still use it.
highlight_word_under_cursor.vim
Previous versions used :syntax but the last iteration uses :match so it might bug you if you wanted to use :match yourself.
When you land on a word it will highlight other occurrences of that word. But if you move the cursor and are still on the same word, it will stop the highlighting. That is supposed to be convenient.
Oh no I am embarrassed by the code now! Certainly some room for cleanup. Still it has been working pretty well in my experience.
:match for matchadd() though