Why am I not able to go to the next matching entry in vim by just pressing n?

Question

vimtutor says this in lesson 4.2 : The search command

1. In Normal mode type the / character. Notice that it and the cursor appear at the bottom of the screen as with the : command.

   1. Now type 'errroor' . This is the word you want to search for.

   2. To search for the same phrase again, simply type n . To search for the same phrase in the opposite direction, type N .

This works perfectly while practicing with the vim tutor but I can't seem to get it to work with a file .basically when I type the / character and then key in the pattern to search , it is going to the first match as expected . But below the contents of the file I still see my search pattern with a blinking cursor . For example if I my pattern was the string foo , I see /foo and the cursor keeps blinking . Then pressing n just appends the the pressed character to the search string and the search pattern now becomes /foon which is not what I want .

Why am I seeing this issue and how can I fix this ?

Answer 1

You need to conclude the search by pressing Enter. You're back in normal mode, where the n / N commands apply. As you may have noticed, Vim is a modal editor (best seen in that you need to press i to insert characters).

Vim appears to jump to the search pattern while you're typing it, but that's just a preview by the 'incsearch' feature.

Answer 2

pressing n just appends the the pressed character to the search string and the search pattern now becomes /foon

vim is modal, it has command mode (where n means next match) and it has insert mode (where n means insert the character "n".)

It may be that you are using a special setup of vim, such as cream, that attempts to make vim act like a simple non-modal editor.

If you are using an unmodified vim with no unusual plugins or settings, press Esc to exit insert-mode. The status line usually displays "INSERT" when in insert mode (but you can configure it not to - so check for this)

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Update here's what you can expect to see in two different versions of Vim on two different platforms

Platform 1 - note status info is in reverse and includes flilename and an indicator that a change has been made ([+])

1) After opening a file and typing /hath

2) After pressing i

Platform 2 - note that all onscreen matches are highlighted.

1) After opening a file and typing /hath

2) After pressing i

Some aspects of Vim's appearance depend on version and configuration.

use :ve to display version of vim. It may help potential answerers for you to amend your question and include this information together with the name and version of operating system.