In Spacemacs, is there an easy way to make * (which calls the function spacemacs/enter-ahs-forward) work like it does in Vim?
That is, I want * to perform forward searching like in Vim, without opening up the "Symbol Highlight Transient State".
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2 Answers
After some searching I have figured this out.
Evil actually already has the search-forward functionality just like vim. Here is where the mapping to * is defined:
https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil/blob/427cf5faa57e8794ac93f594dc3d1972e687a25a/evil-maps.el#L232
However, it appears that spacemacs overrides this mapping:
Spacemacs is using use-package to load the auto-highlight-symbol package, and in the :config section it is overwriting the mapping for *.
So in order to overwrite this mapping, it is neccesary to call define-key after auto-highlight-symbol has already been loaded. The following code can be put in your .spacemacs file:
(defun dotspacemacs/user-config ()
(with-eval-after-load 'auto-highlight-symbol
(define-key evil-motion-state-map (kbd "*") 'evil-search-word-forward)))
The following can be used if you want to overwrite both forward search and backward search:
(defun dotspacemacs/user-config ()
(with-eval-after-load 'auto-highlight-symbol
(define-key evil-motion-state-map (kbd "*") 'evil-search-word-forward)
(define-key evil-motion-state-map (kbd "#") 'evil-search-word-backward)))
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1That worked like a charm for me, with the only nagging that the searched term does not populate the search history. Therefore, when you do
/a, position yourself over another word, say "bbb" and hit*, the next time you hitnyou'll search for "a". I'll probably turn this into a question.– JirCommented Sep 20, 2018 at 14:07
Evil-visualstar is a package that provides the feature, but I am not sure of the compatibility with spacemacs.
