Find the next occurrence of a variable in vim

If you press n in command mode it will give you the next match of your search.

More detail:

  • / will start forward search
  • ? will start backward search
  • n will give you the next result in the direction you are searching
  • N will give you the previous result wrt the direction you are searching in

If you have the cursor over the variable in question, you can press * and it will search for the next occurrence or # will search for the previous one.

This is equivalent to typing:

/\<n\>

(\< matches on the start of a word and \> matches on the end of word). The only difference (for reasons I'm not sure of) is that * and # don't pay attention to the 'smartcase' option.

See:

:help *
:help /\<