How to do whole-word search similar to “grep -w” in Vim

Question

How do I do a whole-word search like grep -w in Vim, which returns only lines where the sought-for string is a whole word and not part of a larger word?

Answer 1

One can use 'very-magic' \v to simplify the command:

/\v<yourword>

As mentioned in comments, \v indicates that all alphanumeric characters have special meaning hence one needs to enter only < and > rather than escaping them with \< and \>.

Answer 2

\<bar\>

matches bar but neither foobar nor barbaz nor foobarbaz.

Use it like this in a substitution:

:s/\<bar\>/baz

Use it like this to list all the lines containing the whole word bar:

:g/\<bar\>

:h pattern is a good read.

Answer 3

You want /\<yourword\>.

If your cursor is on a word, then you can press * and it will do a word-only search for the word under the cursor.