Live Substitution In Neovim

Replacing text in vim can be quite frustrating especially since it doesn’t have
live feedback to what is changing. Today I was watching Josh Branchaud’s
Vim-Unalphabet series on Youtuve and realized that his vim was doing this and I
had to have it.

How to do it.

I had to do a bit of searching and found a great post from vimcasts that shows exactly how to get the live search and replace highlighting using inccomand

:h inccommand

'inccommand' 'icm'  string  (default "")
            global
    "nosplit": Shows the effects of a command incrementally, as you type.
    "split"  : Also shows partial off-screen results in a preview window.
    Works for |:substitute|, |:smagic|, |:snomagic|. |hl-Substitute|
    If the preview is too slow (exceeds 'redrawtime') then 'inccommand' is
    automatically disabled until |Command-line-mode| is done.

Add this to your config

I believe that this is a neovim only feature, add it into your
~/.config/nvim/init.vim file. You can see it in my
dotfiles
as well.

set inccommand=nosplit

See it in Action

The Video that inspired this

Check out Josh Branchaud’s great series on the Vim-Unalphabet.