movement similar to "f" but you can specify more than one character as search criteria

Question

Say we got this sentence:

pafpaf apfa fpa i apa panda pafas af

I would like to quickly move the cursor from the start of the line to the beginning of the word panda. I could do 6fp, but what takes time is counting the number of p's. It would be much faster if I simply could search for the word in the current line and instantly jump to it.

Now, I could just do a search for it: /panda hit enter and then :noh (to remove highlighting), but having to write out :noh every time is annoying and time-consuming.

Does anyone have any suggestion for a solution?

Answer 1

I use a mapping <LEADER>/ so I can toggle highlighting on and off:

nnoremap <silent><expr> <LEADER>/
            \ (&hls && v:hlsearch ? ':nohls' : ':set hls')."\n"

I found that the above would highlight the last searched term when I opened vim, which I found irritating, but I fixed that by adding | noh to the setting hlsearch:

set hlsearch | noh " highlight matches for searched (turn off when sourcing)

Also it's worth mentioning that after using fp (or Fp, tp, Tp etc.) you can use ; and , to jump to the next/previous occurrence of 'p' (or whatever you searched for). So in cases where you do a f motion, and don't jump right to the letter you want because you didn't notice that same letter occurring sooner, you can just hit ; a few times to get there... and , to go back one if you over-shoot.