Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

Suppress errors when substituting in vim

The substitute (or s) command in vim throws an error the search pattern is not found.

:substitute/banana/apple
E486: Pattern not found: banana

This error can be suppressed with the e flag at the end of the statement.

:substitute/banana/apple/e

When operating in just one file or on just one line the error is a minor annoyance but when combining the substitute command with :argdo you receive an error for every file in the args list that does not contain the pattern in question.

A typical argdo command would look like this.

:argdo s/banana/apple/gec

The flags are:

g - global

e - suppress errors

c - confirm

See More #vim TILs
Every developer at Hashrocket is a Vim expert. Check out our development environment, Dotmatrix, and if you are in Chicago, come to the Vim Chicago Meetup hosted at our Chicago office.