Why do you have to make your regex "very magic" so that you don't have to escape your capture quotes? And if you set your environment to very magic, you are non-standard and may have compliance issues. I am just wondering why vim uses a different regex syntax than say, perl?
3 Answers
In addition to the mentioned reasons vim has some cards in the sleeve when it comes to regex, for example, to match positive look behind we do:
:%s/^foo \zsbar/moo/g
The above command will substitute "bar" for "moo" in the lines started with "foo".
the \zs makes easier to set a positive look-behind and \ze makes easier to make a positive look-ahead.
We also have a way to match only in the "visual area" -> \%V
:'<,'>s/\%Vthis/that/g
Although using the global flag "g" the substitution is restricted to the visual are due \%V
To read an awesome article about how amazing vim regexes can be, follow this link: https://bitbucket.org/snippets/sergio/7nzqxx
We can also use some "submatch" tricks on vim substitution https://dev.to/voyeg3r/vim-math-on-vim-substitution-4obo
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