It is common while in vim to perform substitution tasks over the text you are editing. This is often accomplished using the following command:
:%s/<find>/<replacement>/g
The %s
command will perform substitution over every line within the buffer. The /<find>/<replace>
specifies the substitution to perform. Finally the /g
indicates that this should apply to multiple occurrences if they are present on the same line.
This works great, although there is little affordance in determining whether the specified <find>
will hit the matches you are interested in. The aforementioned command is a all-or-nothing with respect to execution, there is no visual feedback until you execute the command.