Vim has an option called “hlsearch” that highlights every instance of your most recent search term. Like this:
Searching for "ground" in a document using Vim.
Emacs has the viper and vimpulse plugins that closely emulate vi/vim keyboard commands, but no hlsearch. If you’re using viper and a version of Emacs later than 22.0, pasting the following into your .viper will give you this functionality.
(defun viper-flash-search-pattern ()
(hi-lock-mode 0) (hi-lock-mode 1)
(hi-lock-set-pattern
(car viper-search-history) 'hi-green)
)
Unfortunately toggling hi-lock mode (line 2) is destructive if you’re using hi-lock mode for anything in addition to highlighting search terms. In other words, there’s probably a better way to write this function. To solve the problem of clearing highlighting I’m no longer using, I use this (inefficient) snippet:
(viper-record-kbd-macro "//" 'vi-state [(meta x) h i - l o c k - m o d e (control m) (meta x) h i - l o c k - m o d e (control m)] 't)
Tags: keyboard-fu, linux, software
