The global command as a poor man’s quickfix list

You can use Q in normal mode to enter Ex mode. Nobody really uses it any more, and it’s mostly there for compatibility. Most people remap Q to nothing in normal mode to avoid getting dropped into Ex mode by mistake — which I think is fair.

But Ex mode does have one interesting trick still going for it. If you invoke the global command from within Ex mode and specify visual as the command, like this:

:g/foo/visual

… you can use it as a poor man’s quickfix list.

Running that command for the first time will drop you in normal mode on the first matching line. Re-entering Ex mode will automatically jump you to the next match

This isn’t always useful, but it’s occasionally handy when you want to perform a manual edit on each line, followed by some commands, for a number of lines in the file.

For example:

:g/foo/visual | w

That’ll allow you to perform manual edits on each line matching foo, and when you re-enter Ex mode to jump to the next match, Vim will automatically save the buffer for you.