On Feb 11, 2015 7:01 PM, "Brian L. Matthews" <blmatth...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 2/11/15 1:36 PM, Tim Chase wrote: >> >> On 2015-02-11 13:24, Brian L. Matthews wrote: >>> >>> This is probably one of those "You use vim and don't know how to do >>> that?!?!" things, but I'd like to be able use the contents of a >>> register in a search. I often have some text and want to find out >>> where else that text occurs. I can get the text into a register, >>> but then would like to search for that text. >> >> You're close. You can use control+R followed by the register-name to >> insert that register at the search prompt. So you can do something >> like >> >> /<C-R>b >> >> to insert the content of the "b" register at the search prompt. > > Sweet! That's exactly what I'm looking for. I didn't know about ctrl-R, that seems like it will be generally useful. > >> Note >> that this is interpreted as a regular expression, so if your register >> contains regex metacharacters, you'd have to escape them. Which can >> be done from a mapping with something like >> >> :cnoremap <f4> <C-R>=escape(@b, '.\*/')<cr> >> >> where the ".\*/" is a list of characters to escape. > > Yes, I'd expect it to be treated as a regex. Thanks for the mapping though, I'll definitely use that. > >> You can read up more at >> >> :help c_CTRL-R >> :help @= >> :help escape() >> >> if you want the ugly details. > > I like ugly details :-), I just couldn't find them in this case. "ctrl-r" doesn't appear in :help /, or :help register. It does in :help search, but I don't think in a way that would have told me what I needed, even if I did know I needed ctrl-R. On the plus side, cmdline.txt (which is where :help c_CTRL-R takes you), looks quite useful, I'll have to read the whole file. > > Thanks! > > Brian
As an addendum, the contents of the search are in the / register, so you can always do something like: let @/ = @* Again, as Tim pointed out, this would convert what was previously considered plain text to a regular expression. Salman -- -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_use" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to vim_use+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
