bagohart / search-in-visual-selection.nvim

search-in-visual-selection.nvim

This Neovim plugin provides an expression-mapping that restricts search to the current visual selection.

Why?

Vim/Neovim lets you search in the visual selection by adding the %V pattern element to the search pattern. This has a little problem: as soon as you use visual mode again, the matches will disappear, which is annoying if your workflow relies on seeing the matches and using the gn text object to change them.

This plugin solves that by problem by instead using the %l and %v pattern elements to restrict the search to the current visual selection.

Mappings

This plugin does not create any mappings. Add one yourself:

vim.keymap.set('x', 'g/', '<Plug>(search-in-visual-selection)')

Usage

Use visual mode to choose the selection in which you want to search. Press g/. The / command-line will appear and be prepopulated with a very ugly looking string such as

\v%\>19l%\<22l%\>9v%\<32v

Note that this uses very magic mode and in particular this way of doing it enables incsearch.

Requirements

Developed and tested on Neovim 0.8.1.

Bugs

• If the blockwise visual selection goes to the end of the line (using $), then this is not always recognized correctly, since Vim for some reason does not expose this information.
• Character-wise visual mode for more than one line is treated like visual line mode.

Credits

I got the basic idea from vis, but I wanted something in lua that supports incsearch and doesn't try to hide the pattern from me.