Find patterns in Gvim

[Julius Hamilton]

Hey,

From trying it myself, it seems that the "find" menu option in Gvim does not allow entering patterns or regular expressions, such as a period to represent any character, or "\n" to represent a newline, but only literal, explicit text matching.

I was curious why this is and if there is any GUI / menu way to search for regular expression patterns or if you must use the Vim text-based command "/" for this.

Thank you very much,

Julius

[Christian Brabandt]

Yes, I think the :promptfind and :promptreplace commands do a literal
search and replace only. If you want to use regexes, just use the `/`
(for finding) or `:%s` (for replacing) command.

Best,
Christian
--
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[Bram Moolenaar]

This was an intentional choice. The idea is that the menu would be used
by beginners, who don't know the keyboard commands yet. These users
would also not know what characters need to be escaped in a pattern.

As Christian mentioned, once you know Vim a bit you would just use
"/pattern" and ":s/from/to".

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