Is there a way to set "very magic" for all searches?
At the moment I am using a mapping. But I find the \v
distracting.
nnoremap / /\v
No, currently there is no way to be "very magic" automatically. Even if there were, I would very strongly discourage you from setting such an option since plugins would probably start to fail in odd ways with the option set. (They already do if you set 'nomagic'.)
/\v
?:help magic
has more info.