VimTrick: Open to a pattern

Open Vim to the first occurrence of a pattern

In a recent VimTrick, we covered opening Vim to a specific line. Today’s trick is a slight variation on this topic that came up in discussion after that post - one that I am already finding uses for in my workflow today. It’s possible to open Vim to the first occurrence of a pattern, right from the command line. It uses a similar command line syntax:

vim +/your_pattern some_file.name 

Argument order doesn’t matter, it works the other way, too:

vim some_file.name +/your_pattern 

Some might point out that this method uses an extra keystroke compared to jumping to the pattern after Vim loads with /pattern<Enter>. But a distinct advantage to opening it from the command line is the ability to repeat this open/jump combination when editing the file again. Remember, in your shell, ctrl-r does a reverse search through your shell history, giving you quick access to edit this same section of this same file again.

I find this useful for editing config files or .env files. If I need to commonly change a certain environment variable, opening the file to the pattern from the command line allows me quick access from my shell history.

Here’s a screencast of this in action:

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• 👍Great trick, very useful. Thanks!

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