In Vim, how to search and replace in visual selection?

Posted on In QA

Search and replace in the whole text in Vim can be done by :%s/from/to/gc. But how to search and replace in visual selection only?

The %V atom in Vim restricts a pattern so that it matches only inside the visual selection.

So, your command for searching and replacing only in the visual selection can be

:%s/%Vfrom/to/gc

In addition, you can use marks for the beginning and end of the visual selection as the start,end range for the :s command:

'<  start line
`<  start character
'>  end line
`>  end character

Eric Ma

Eric is a systems guy. Eric is interested in building high-performance and scalable distributed systems and related technologies. The views or opinions expressed here are solely Eric's own and do not necessarily represent those of any third parties.

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