Sometimes, when you’re using the :substitute command, you don’t want to replace everything that your pattern matches. Sometimes, you want to be able to go through the matches one by one, and confirm whether you want to substitute on a case-by-case basis.
Vim has a flag for the :substitute command that allows us to do this.
Let’s say you have a substitution to replace all instances of foo with bar in the buffer. The command for doing something like this is :%s/foo/bar/g. To make Vim confirm each match before performing the substitution, you can add the c flag to the end of the substitution command — e.g. :%s/foo/bar/gc.
This drops us into an interactive mode where we can:
- confirm substitutions with
y - skip making substitutions with
n - perform all of the remaining substitutions with
a - stop making further substitutions with
q
Let’s try this in the editor. Try using this trick to replace all instances of foo with bar, except in the second paragraph.