Question

Is there any easy/quick way to “yank” into vim’s “last search” register (“/)?

From the vim documentation, it appears that the answer is no, but that it can be assigned via a “let” command:

It is writable with ":let", you can change it to have 'hlsearch' highlight
other matches without actually searching.  You can't yank or delete into this
register.

Ideally what I’d like to do is something like:

"/5yw

which would yank the next 5 words under the cursor & put them in the last search buffer

Alternatively, if there is a way to search for the contents of a named register, that would work too. In other words, if I could do:

"A5yw

and then search for what is in register A, that would work too.

The closest I can come is to yank into a named register & then copy that register into the last search register, e.g.

"A5yw
:let @/=@A

At the risk of making a long question longer, I want to state that it’s not always 5 words I’d like to “yank & search” — sometimes it’s 17 characters, sometimes it’s to the end of the line, etc… so a hard-coded macro doesn’t give me the flexibility I’d want.

Answer 1

After pressing / to enter a search string, you can then use Ctrl-R and then type the letter representing the register that you want to use.

eg.

• First, "Ayw to yank a word into register A
• Then, / ^R A to put the contents of register A into the search string.