Perform a non-regex search/replace in vim

Question

When doing search/replace in vim, I almost never need to use regex, so it\'s a pain to constantly be escaping everything, Is there a way to make it default to not using regex or

Answer 1

If you want to search literally, you can use the \V regex atom. This almost does what you want, except that you also need to escape the backslash. You could define your own search command, that would search literally. Something like this:

 :com! -nargs=1 Search :let @/='\V'.escape(, '\/')| normal! n

And then use :Search /foobar/baz

For Substitute, you could then after a :Search command simply use

:%s//replace/g

since then Vim would implicitly pick up the last search item and use the for replacing.

(Just want to give you some ideas)