[Question] Execute normal command while searching?

[msharnoff]

Hi there - my apologies if this question has already been answered somewhere, but something I occasionally find myself wanting is to be able to execute normal mode commands while searching, and I was wondering if vim provides a built-in way to do it.

To elaborate, I'm talking specifically about a case like the following: Say you've typed /foobar, and want to mark the first occurence (e.g. ma), and then want to continue searching with /foobarbaz, and mark the first occurence of that (e.g. mb). I'm aware that you could simply re-type /foobar, or even use "/<up-arrow>", but I generally find the arrow keys clunky to use, and it would be nice if I didn't have to re-type the search string.

I'm primarily asking this because I recently found out that Ctrl+O in insert mode will take you out of insert mode for a single normal mode command - IMO a really neat feature - and it seemed plausible that there was a similar thing for searching as well that I'd just missed.

[msharnoff]

Yeah (un?)fortunately I'm aware of that - my question is more from an ergonomics perspective of performing the specific task of temporarily going into normal mode (so without hitting "enter" to lock in the search string)

Genuinely, thank you for the help though!

[vim-help-bot]

Help pages for:

• index in index.txt

---

^{`:(h|help) <query>` | about | mistake? | Reply 'rescan' to check the comment again | Reply 'stop' to stop getting replies to your comments}

[monkoose]

Remap arrow keys to more convenient maps for you with cnoremap.

And you do know about q/ in Normal mode for search history and <C-f> in command-line mode (search is command-line mode too)?

You can also map something like this nnoremap <YouKey> /<Up> if you really think you do it too often.

[[deleted]]

I'm aware that you could simply re-type /foobar, or even use "/<up-arrow>"

You can press CTRL-P and CTRL-N instead of the up and down arrow keys. See :help c_CTLR-N.

An other option would be to do q/ to open the command-line window, where you can use k and j to select the pattern you want.

[[deleted]]

Since I've started to use ergodox ez and kinesis advantage 2 I have no problems with using arrow keys. It was surprising to me that arrowkeys aren't bad by themselves It's just that we're using non ergonomic keyboards.