Vim Search and Replace notes

Vim’s search and replace capability is extensive. I’m sure I just use a fraction of it’s power on a regular basis. This post is where I’m keeping my notes on the various features that I often forget about.

• Regular expression search and replace with substrings:
  
  %s/a\(first\)b\(second\)c/d \1 \2 d/

  That’s just a normal search on any line of the file %, searching for two substrings that we want to keep. The replacement string will be anything really, and use \1 and \2 to put the substrings wherever we want.