replace doesn't allow regex

[dprr]

Description of the problem or steps to reproduce

Say I want to replace 4 spaces with a tab:

1. Type CtrlE to get the command window
2. Type replace ' ' '\t'

That would replace 4 spaces with the \t literal rather than a tab character

Specifications

Version: 2.0.4
Commit hash: c5b0c2d
OS: Linux 5.6.13-arch1-1
Terminal: Fish

[zyedidia]

I’ll look into fixing this. In the meantime I recommend using the > retab command (along with the appropriate tabstospaces value you want) to achieve what you want.

[dprr]

thanks

[AndrewDDavis]

Note this issue isn't really about regex, but ANSI C Escape Sequences, of which \t, \n, and \\ are really common. These can be expanded e.g. in a Bash shell with e.g. printf $'here are 2 tabs "\t\t" and a newline\n'.

It looks like it might be enough to pass the replacement string through fmt.Sprintf to interpret the codes, but maybe this would complicate the selection boundaries after replacement.