Hi, Searching for "hello world" in vim doesn't match "hello\nworld". This is annoying when editing documents. The solution is to search for "hello\_sworld". But it is frustrating to type \_s instead of a space in every search.
I have been getting around this by calling my own search function (appended at the very end of this email). This issue has also been discussed before: http://bugs.donarmstrong.com/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=256743 and the solution then was to use a vim-script function too. The problem with vim-script hacks is that they do not provide incremental searching. I often find myself doing an incsearch, having it fail and then having to try again with my own search function. It might be possible to re-implement incsearch in vim-script, but why reinvent the wheel? I think it would be better if I could hook into vim's existing interactive search mechanisms. For reference, emacs has an option to change the meaning of ' ' in its incremental regex search (obtained with M-C-s), the option is set in .emacs with (setq search-whitespace-regexp "[ \t\r\n]+") I intend to write a patch for vim, if only for my own use. It seems that I could do one of a few things: - add an option to allow search strings to be filtered through an arbitrary user function before being used - add a string option that would replace ' ' in searches. - add a Boolean option which offers one specific line-break ignoring behaviour. - extend the behaviour of the magic option (how?) Which (if any) of these is likely to be adopted? Perhaps these lines in doc/todo.txt are relevant? I don't really understand them: From xvim: Allow a newline in search patterns (also for :s, can delete newline). Add BOW, EOW, NEWL, NLORANY, NLBUTANY, magic 'n' and 'r', etc. [not in xvim:] Add option to switch on matches crossing ONE line boundary. Can anyone tell me what xvim is, what the acronyms stand for and what the reference to magic options means? Thanks for your time, Iain. " This is the search function I have been using: function! MySearch() let l:str = input('/') let l:str = substitute(l:str," ",'\\_s\\+',"g") let @/ = l:str call histadd('/',l:str) call search(l:str) endfunction
