Stay in Search Mode

You are probably already aware that you can search in Vim by typing / and entering a pattern. Typically you might search like so:

/some_pattern<CR>

Hitting <CR>, aka carriage return or “Enter”, immediately exits search mode. That means that refining the search patterns and running it again requires that you return to search mode using / followed by the up arrow to reenter the previous pattern. Then you can modify the pattern and try again. But there is a better way!

• ctrl-g – Jumps to the next occurrence of the pattern, but keeps focus in the command line
• ctrl-t – Jumps to the previous occurrence, but again keeps focus in your search

To use these commands, make sure you have incremental search enabled. Either run the :set incsearch command or put set incsearch in your .vimrc, which we’d highly recommend.

This allows for a search workflow that where you can see and page through the matches while modifying and refining your search pattern. Here’s a short screencast of these in action: