Search for an exact word in Vim command mode

vim search

47,357

Use regular expressions:

/\<your_exact_word\>

In other words, enclose your search string between \< and \>

47,357

Daniel Ozean

struct descriptionOf { int elligent_Developer; short list_of_proven_skills; long list_of_ambitions; long long int erest_in_various_technologies; double effort_in_achieving_skills_and_ambitions; float ing_innovator; char of_a_hands_on_doer; }goldenmean; Software Developer with work experience in areas of Video/Image processing and codecs,DSP and multimedia Systems,on DSP/Multicore processor architecures, for devices and applications in Consumer Electronics, Communications industry. Programming languages: C,C++,Matlab/Octave,Python,DSP or RISC assembly languages.

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

Daniel Ozean over 1 year

I want to search for an exact word in Vim in command mode (using Vim command /wordtosearch, NOT the search of the current word at the cursor using * or # commands), e.g. I would like to search for an exact word say CIF but I do not want to find CIF_handle or CIF_drv.

How to make Vim search for exact word in the command mode?

(I don't mind the case of the word searched, because I already have ignorecase set.)
Daniel Ozean over 13 years

@Thanks: workd nicely. Does enclosing the word in \< .. \> make it a regex based search.
Janne Pikkarainen over 13 years

Yes, it's a regex search.
scigor over 11 years

But what do u do if u need to search for a string like "1...". It will highlight all numbers starting with 1 and not the string with the dots.
Edward over 7 years

Sorry, but this is not an answer to the question stated. If you want to add information to the accepted answer, you may want to add a comment over there.
Admin almost 7 years

Doesn't work with brackets.
eigenfield over 4 years

How do you configure vim to behave with an exact word search without needing to wrap it with \< and \> char. Can vim be made to do exact word search by /eightFoldPaths ?