Find the next occurrence of a variable in vim

I would like to know if/how I can make vim look for the next occurrence of a variable. Let's say the variable's name is simply 'n', then /n would give me all occurrences of that letter, which isn't always terribly helpful. I guess I could create a regex to solve the problem, but I wondered whether there was some command/keystroke I simply don't yet know about; and as all my googling has been to no avail I decided to put a question on here.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Solution 1:

If you have the cursor over the variable in question, you can press * and it will search for the next occurrence or # will search for the previous one.

This is equivalent to typing:

/\<n\>

(\< matches on the start of a word and \> matches on the end of word). The only difference (for reasons I'm not sure of) is that * and # don't pay attention to the 'smartcase' option.

See:

:help *
:help /\<

Solution 2:

If you press n in command mode it will give you the next match of your search.

More detail:

• / will start forward search
• ? will start backward search
• n will give you the next result in the direction you are searching
• N will give you the previous result wrt the direction you are searching in