About

InteractiveReplace is a Vim plugin that lets you interactively choose replacement text while you search/replace.

Usage

Just type

:InteractiveReplace

at the Vim console, or type the shortcut binding in normal mode:

 <leader>r

(on my system that's \r). While searching; to skip the current term, press enter without a replace term, and to abort press Ctrl-c.

Install

Assuming you have Git and Pathogen installed, which you should, just run:

 $ git clone https://github.com/hwrod/interactive-replace.git ~/.vim/bundle/interactive-replace

Optionally, to configure a different key binding, add this line to your .vimrc file:

let g:InteractiveReplace_map = 'X'

where X is something like <F5> or \i

To set the highlighting for the search term, define the highlight group IntSearchHL in your .vimrc file. Ex.: (the default)

 hi IntSearchHL ctermbg=blue guibg=blue

Examples

Say you wanted to find and replace all occurrences of Bel-air in a text file, but you wanted to specify what the replacement text is each time without having to redo a substitution or create a very complicated regex.

With a search performed (e.g. /Bel-air), type \r to bring up InteractiveReplace. Then for each highlighted term, type the replacement text and press Enter.

Easy consecutive substitutions

---

In a programming context, you can easily substitute variable names stemming from one opened line.

For example, to write out a skeleton for your replaces, you could type (with the cursor on line 6):

 7odrawChart data.tmp[Esc]

to get:

Now use InteractiveReplace on /tmp to sequentially replace variable names:

In this way, Interactive-Replace works like a block-select that lets you choose replacement text for each line.

F.A.Q.

• How do I install Pathogen?
  • Just put pathogen.vim into your ~/.vim/autoload folder. Then put these two lines in your .vimrc file:
    • filetype plugin indent on
    • execute pathogen#infect()
• How do I install InteractiveReplace without using Pathogen?
  • If you wanna be really dirty about it, download the zipball and extract the contents to your Vim directory.
• How do I update InteractiveReplace?
  • The beauty of installing with Pathogen is that you cd into ~/.vim/bundle/interactive-replace/ and type $ git pull to get the latest updates.

Todo

There are a few ways InteractiveReplace can be improved, including:

• highlighting the current search term in a different color

Pull requests are highly encouraged. Questions/comments welcome too.