CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vimsublimetext2
Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker

Reputation: 5199

Cycling and/or highlighting through a vim selection

The feature I am thinking of is kind of inspired by a feature that I really like about sublime text.

In sublime text, if you select a sequence of characters, it automatically puts a little box around it (to distinguish it from the word that you just highlighted). For me, this is very helpful because I can see and find specific things of the code much faster.

It would be awesome to have something similar to my vim environment. It does not have to be exactly the same as the one in sublime though, but it would be awesome if it were as similar as possible plus the additional feature to easy cycling through similar words.

Currently, what I am doing is highlight the work I want and then manually typing it to the search command /. It would be much better if I can just highlight it in visual mode and then automatically highlight similar words on the current screen with a different colour from the highlighting in visual mode and then have a quick key short cut to cycling through them, if I wished to do that.

I am not sure if a there exists a plugin or something that already does that, but that would cool! Ideally, I would want to to know as many details of the commands/changes to the vimrc file, so that I have the most control over this feature and be able to customize it as I wish.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 382

Answers (2)

Ingo Karkat
Ingo Karkat

Reputation: 172698

My SearchHighlighting plugin changes the * command so that it just toggles the highlighting for the current word, without the movement to the next match (for which you can press n, or pass a count). This also works in visual mode, using the selection. I find this very handy for highlighting all matches.

There's also a mode that automatically highlights the current word / selection, like what many IDEs offer.

Other plugins

  • If you want more permanent highlighting, separate from searching, the Mark plugin offers that.
  • To get an orientation about the number of matches (without highlighting them), I have the SearchPosition plugin.

Upvotes: 1

romainl
romainl

Reputation: 196789

You can get the highlighting you are looking for by enabling the hlsearch option:

:set hlsearch

It will highlight every occurrence of the last search pattern and thus work after all the following commands (and their relatives):

/foo<CR>
?bar<CR>
:s/fizz/buzz/g
*    
#

You can use n to jump to the next occurrence in the direction of your search and N to do the same in the opposite direction.

To highlight every occurrence of the current word "without" moving the cursor, you can simply do:

*N

or:

*``

to jump to the next occurrence and jump back immediately.

Doing the same for visually selected text is a bit trickier but still possible…

  • either via a lightweight plugin like visualstar or The Search Party,

  • or with a tiny bit of crude vimscript in your ~/.vimrc:

    " this function cleans up the search pattern
function! GetVisualSelection()
  let old_reg = @v
  normal! gv"vy
  let raw_search = @v
  let @v = old_reg
  return substitute(escape(raw_search, '\/.*$^~[]'), "\n", '\\n', "g")
endfunction

" map * and # in visual mode so that they do the same as *N and #N in normal mode
xnoremap * :<C-u>/<C-r>=GetVisualSelection()<CR><CR>N
xnoremap # :<C-u>?<C-r>=GetVisualSelection()<CR><CR>N

Upvotes: 3

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