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Martin Tournoij
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Select multiple words, one at a time, then replace them all

Goal: Select multiple words, one at a time, then replace them all.

visual studio feature select and replace

I'm new to Vim; I come from Visual Studio. I would like to achieve one important feature that helped me a lot in my productivity: Select multiple words, one at a time, and then replace them all.

I know there is a Vim way of replacing using:

:% s/target-word/replacement/gc

But as you can see it's still a lot to write compared to its counterpart in VS Code. Could someone help me with a vim script or a plugin to achieve this in the most similar way?

  • imagine that I already have selected the word with viw, for example.
  • then I want to have a single command to select the next match.
  • then start writing and see those changes written in real-time or after hitting Esc.

[Edit] Accepted answer

Thanks D. Ben Knoble; you provided to me the more convenient and practical answer. As the main goal is to change a word locally, the combination *cgn Is perfect.

As I'm changing the also the current word and * jumps me to the next match, what I add to go back to that word is Ctrl + N.

* Ctrl + N cgn then .

enter image description here

Sam
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