VimTrick: Insert matched pattern

Use this trick for swift find and replace

We have written numerous tips about pattern matching, mostly because it’s such a valuable skill to develop. A few popular ones include Repeat last substitution, Stay in search mode, and Count occurrences.

But there also just seems to be so much to learn about this corner of Vim. Here’s a trick I learned recently: An ampersand, & , in your replacement pattern will insert the matched pattern into the replacement text. This could be useful in a lot of places, such as surrounding text with something. (Although you are using Surround.vim, right?)

Take a look at the gif at the bottom of this post. In the demo, I use this tip to match URLs and replace them with markdown syntax. The substitution looks like so:

%s/https.*/[&]()/g

Here’s what this does:

• % - set the range to the entire file

• s - substitution

• /https.*/ - regex to match https and anything else after it

• [&]()- The & is the magic here and inserts the matched text. In this case, the URL. The rest of the characters are interpreted literally, giving us the linked URL in the resulting markdown.

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Now onto the demo gif…

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