find and replace in vi vim

Search and replace in vim

Find and replace text strings in vim file

It is one of the most frequent task you might do while working on vim.

Here are some of the most used ones

1. Find and search a single string and replace the first occurrence only
:s/search/replace/g

The above code would search for “search” and replaces it with “replace” and it would do it only once

2. Find all occurrences of the string and replace those
:%s/search/replace/g

In this case all strings in the file with “search” would be replaced by “replace”

3. Find and ask for confirmation before changing it
:%s/search/replace/gc

It would do the usual task but this time it would ask for confirmation before it changes it.

You can do search and replace in vi or vim using the above command being on vim. Don’t forget to be out of the update mode otherwise you would just be writing the above commands.