Vim regex not need \ to escape

regular expressionvim

In Vim is there an option to write regexs in the same style as Awk for example

/sp\{0,\}/
Would be

/sp{0,}/

Best Answer

Preceding your pattern with \v will make the pattern “magic”, and symbols like { and [ have an interpreted meaning (and literals need to be escaped).

So /\vsp{1,} would find what you wanted (I just tested it).

You can make this a sort of default by remapping / to /\v with the following lines in your vimrc:

nnoremap / /\v
vnoremap / /\v

See :help pattern for more.

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Using Regex in Vim movement

As stated in a comment by Sardathrion, you can search to navigate. This is actually too useful in Vim to ignore. A few tips regarding search to navigate:

Use / to search forward, ? to search backward.
You may want to turn on incsearch so that Vim will jump to matches as you type. Hit Enter when you are at the location you want.
You may also want to turn on search highlight with hlsearch.
After arriving at the location you want, you can use nohlsearch to disable the highlight. It will be enabled again when you do the next search.
If you find yourself using lots of regex consider using \v ("very magic").

Vim regex to search for lines containing string1 AND string2

Find two words in either order in a line:

/.*red\&.*blue

/\(red.*blue\)\|\(blue.*red\)

Other tools use a slightly different regular expression dialect; in less, you'd use:

/(red.*blue|blue.*red)

Best Answer

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Using Regex in Vim movement

Vim regex to search for lines containing string1 AND string2

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