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If I have syntax highlighting rules setup using conceal to hide or change certain characters in a file, how do I search what is displayed, as opposed to what the buffer actually contains?

The concealed part may contain formatting markup, for example, which I wish to ignore.

I'd like a method that:

  • doesn't rely on the specific rules used to create the concealed text.
  • provides some level of compatibility with the traditional search operators like n, *, etc.

Can this be done without re-implementing n, * and the like?

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This is not really possible, as concealing was meant as a sole method for displaying chars instead of the actual content. In the same sense, you can't really search for what has been folded or signs. The only method I know is using screenchar() function as shown in my other answer, but that is not really ready to use.

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  • While it's true I can't search for what has been folded, by using 'foldopen', I can tell Vim to match at most once in a folded region, so there are small steps in that direction. Anyway, what's the stance on conceal? Is there hope of seeing such functionality implemented?
    – muru
    Jun 6, 2016 at 17:32
  • true, but you still couldn't search for what is returned by foldtext(). Anyways, you might want to suggest an improvement at vim-dev ml and see what Bram thinks, but my feeling is, this won't be implemented anytime soon since there are still too many bugs/particularities with conceal mode today and nobody really looked for fixing it. I did try once, but it was complicated and broke in subtle ways.
    – Christian Brabandt
    Jun 6, 2016 at 19:18

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