> How would I search for a regex within a particular area? The text
> document is very long, and I don't want to match all instances, just
> those I care about. I would probably select the text visually.
If you happen to know the line numbers of your interesting
section, you can use
/\<200l\>100lregexp
which will search for "regexp" as long as it falls between line
100 and line 200 (exclusive).
Alternatively, you can use something like
:vnoremap g/
<c-c>/<bslash>%><c-r>=line("'<lt>")-1<cr>l<bslash>%<lt><c-r>=line("'>")+1<cr>l
(all in one line) will prime the search line with the search
line-limiting. This makes it a bit easier so that within a
visually selected range, type "g/" and then type your search
regexp after the prepopulated line.
This works for line-wise visual mode. Character-wise and
block-wise get a whole lot hairier.
Hope this gives you some ideas,
-tim