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In vim when searching or replacing an exact word you need to type:
\<word\>
to match it exactly, this is cumbersome to type, and I find myself wanting to search/replace exact words a lot more often by default than part of a word. Is there a way to let vim use exact words by default, and then turn this option off/on when necessary?
There isn't an option to treat the whole pattern as word bounded as far as I know. Since you want to replace, that means the text is already in the buffer. You could use * or # on the word in normal mode which performs the \<word\> search for you. Then, cgn to replace the next occurrence, and . to repeat it.
Alternatively, once a search has been made with *, you could use it to start a substitution pattern: :%s//something/g.
This can be made into a key map: nnoremap <leader>r *:%s//. It's used the same way as * except it will also begin a substitution in the command line that you can finish yourself.
* on a word does \<word\> while g* does word searches. Same workflow applies using <c-r> but now you can chose which type of search and replace you perform.
– jecxjo
May 17 '16 at 20:08
<C-R>/. Just :%s//replacement/g with an empty search pattern will use the current search pattern, the one you created with *. See :help last-pattern.
– garyjohn
May 18 '16 at 0:25
You could simply do
:nnoremap / /\<\><left><left>
To make the search key / naturally expand into /\<\> and place the cursor within the search pattern.
:h 'ignorecase'and:h 'smartcase'which change the behavior of the searches and the handling of case in patterns. – statox♦ May 17 '16 at 19:10