CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexvimcommand-line
Drew Stephens
Drew Stephens

Reputation: 17827

Can I turn on extended regular expressions support in Vim?

The characters for extended regular expressions are invaluable; is there a way to turn them on so that I don't have to escape them in my Vim regex, much like the -E flag I can pass to grep(1)?

Upvotes: 66

Views: 16395

Answers (2)

Stephen Niedzielski
Stephen Niedzielski

Reputation: 2637

A workaround is to remap / to prefix searches with "very magic" automatically:

nnoremap / /\v
vnoremap / /\v

Upvotes: 16

Alex Martelli
Alex Martelli

Reputation: 881735

Do :help magic in vim and you'll see there are four levels (very magic, magic, nomagic, and very nomagic) but only the two central ones can be set globally (the default is magic, and with :set commands you can only toggle between magic and nomagic); start your RE with \v to make all the rest of it "very magic" ("all ASCII characters except '0'-'9', 'a'-'z', 'A'-'Z' and '_' have a special meaning") -- but that applies only to that one specific RE!-)

Upvotes: 67

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