'*' and '#' should search whole word

[localvar]

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Issue Summary

* and # not searching whole word

Steps to Reproduce

text as below

abc abcd abcde

1. * on abc
2. n will match abc in abcd and abcde

Technical details:

• VSCode Version: 1.3.0
• VsCodeVim Version: 0.1.1
• OS: windows 10

[johnfn]

Totally true. I was holding off on doing this until we could handle word delimiters in / and ?.

[octref]

@johnfn
Hi Grant I'm interested in taking a shot at this. Do you mind elaborating on "handle word delimiters in / and ?" I can also try fixing that if it's not too complicated.

[johnfn]

@octref awesome! absolutely!

In Vim, when you're searching with / or ?, you can actually use certain special delimiters to indicate you want to match a full word. For instance, / matches only the entire word foo, not foobar or barfoo.

If you use * and # in vim you can tell this is how they work under the hood.

So I would suggest to implement that for / and ?, then rewrite * and # to use / and ? rather than reimplement them.

[jpoon]

From #569, another issue with our current implementation.

   |          "package": hello, world

where | represents where the cursor is.

Expected: / or ? of <package>
Actual: Does nothing

[octref]

@johnfn

Sorry for not responding for so long...

If you do :h pattern-multi-items and :h pattern-atoms, there is a whole slew of patterns. I feel it would be weird to implement some of them but not all. And implementing them all is no small task.

Personally, I mostly use / without any patterns, and some * and # sparingly.
A search on issues also yield no one asking for special patterns.

Maybe we should guide people to use VSCode's built-in Find by Regex, which is also standard Regex, not like Vim's special flavor.

[johnfn]

This was actually finished a while back! :)