romainl

Vim: pushing built-in features beyond their limits

The situation

Searching can be an efficient way to navigate the current buffer.

The first search commands we learn are usually / and ?. These are seriously cool, especially with the incsearch option enabled which lets us keep typing to refine our search pattern. / and ? really shine when all we want is to jump to something we already have our eyeballs on but they are not fit for every situation:

• when we want to search something that's not directly there, those two commands can make us lose context very quickly,
• when we need to compare the matches.