Text search direction in Vim
This can happen if you started out searching backwards with ?foobar
, and you pressed /
in the middle. Now you're searching forward, so n
and N
are switched relative to what you used to have. The same thing will happen if you started with /
and pressed ?
in the middle.
It sounds stupid but did you checked Caps-Lock?
Nathan has already answered why this happens, but if you use both directions regularly and want n
to always look ahead and N
to always look back, no matter which way you searched, you can put this in your .vimrc
:
nmap n /<CR>
nmap N ?<CR>
/
and ?
without parameters perform the last search, in their respective (absolute) directions.