Do a visual select on search in Vim

Question

What is a simple way to do a visual select on the item I searched for in Vim?

I would like to map my n key to not only go to the next search item but also select it. Similarly for p, * and #.

Looking this up gave me answers to searching for selected items, but I want to select searched items.

Answer 1

You can try something like

nnoremap ,n //b<CR>v//e<CR>
vnoremap ,n <Esc>//b<CR>//e<CR>n

. This does not work for one-character matches. For * it will look like this:

nnoremap ,* *v//e<CR>

. None of the solutions work with one character matches, you may try adding h before //e, but this won’t work at the start of the line. I would not suggest to remap default keys due to the mentioned problems.

Answer 2

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Copy_or_change_search_hit