Is there a pattern like ^ in vim?

Question

In Vim normal mode, the 0 command takes you to the first column on the line and ^ takes you to the logical start of line (e.g. the first non-whitespace character). In the regex world, ^ matches the first character on the line, whitespace or not. Does Vim have a pattern that behaves like its '^' command--matching the logical beginning of a line?

Answer 1

There's no shortcut to match the first non-whitespace character on a line, you have to build the pattern yourself, like:

^\s*restofpattern

If you don't want to include the whitespace in your match, you have to use a zero-width assertion, like:

\(^\s*\)\@<=restofpattern

Not exactly pretty, but at least it gets the job done.

Answer 2

To match the first non-whitespace character, you'd just use \S like you normally do.

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If you use ^ in a regex in vim, it will match the actual start of the line, even if it contains whitespace.

For instance, this line starts with a space:

 <- there's a space there you can't see :)

This vim command will remove the leading space:

:%s/^ //

resulting in the following:

<- there's a space there you can't see :)

So, the regex will behave as you expect, even if the command doesn't.