vim regex not need \ to escape

Question

In Vim is there an option to write regexs in the same style as Awk for example

/sp\{0,\}/
Would be

/sp{0,}/

Solution

Preceding your pattern with \v will make the pattern “magic”, and symbols like { and [ have an interpreted meaning (and literals need to be escaped).

So /\vsp{1,} would find what you wanted (I just tested it).

You can make this a sort of default by remapping / to /\v with the following lines in your vimrc:

nnoremap / /\v
vnoremap / /\v

See :help pattern for more.

Comments

[James Andino]

This was all good info and very useful. Is there a way to turn of the escaping of special characters in vim?

[Kevin]

I see what you mean now. I seriously doubt it, that would almost certainly require a different parser developed in parallel, and I doubt it would be a feature with enough demand to justify that extra implementation and maintenance.