Question

I want to write a command that specifies ‘the word under the cursor’ in VIM. For instance, let’s say I have the cursor on a word and I make it appear twice. For instance, if the word is ‘abc’ and I want ‘abcabc’ then I could type:

:s/\(abc\)/\1\1/ 

But then I’d like to be able to move the cursor to ‘def’ and use the same command to change it to ‘defdef’:

:s/\(def\)/\1\1/ 

How can I write the command in the commandline so that it does this?

:s/\(*whatever is under the commandline*\)/\1\1 

Answer 1

<cword> is the word under the cursor (:help <cword>).

You can nmap a command to it, or this series of keystrokes for the lazy will work:

b #go to beginning of current word yw #yank to register 

Then, when you are typing in your pattern you can hit <control-r>0<enter> which will paste in your command the contents of the 0-th register.

You can also make a command for this like:

:nmap <leader>w :s/\(<c-r>=expand("<cword>")<cr>\)/ 

Which will map hitting ” and ‘w’ at the same time to replace your command line with

:s/\(<currentword>\)/