How to act on the currently highlighted search result with evil mode?

Question

When using evil mode search, is there a way to act on the currently highlighted search result by...

• Converting it into a selection.
• Treating it as a text object.
• Having the ability to specify the end of the match when editing.

Example edits could be:

• Delete the text.
• Make the text upper case.
• Change the text for something else.

This something I often want to do when the search is only part of a word, in this case operating on the word is editing past the part of the word I searched for.

Answer 1

After looking into VIM documentation, I found a way to do this which works in evil-mode too. See Visual select current search result.

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gn selects the highlighted text, after pressing this you can operate on the selection.

Pressing n. repeats the operation on the next match.

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Note that you may use gn in place of w in many operations.

• cgn can be used to change the current search result.
• gUgn makes the search result upper case.
• dgn to delete the current highlight.

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While this on it's own is useful, it would be nice to have a way to enable select-on-search (for example, if the search began in visual mode, or if gn was pressed on the previous search result), this is a bit out of the scope of this question though.

Answer 2

For the first point in your question I do not know a default way, but you could define a custom function (and bind it to some key) yourself to change the last match to a selection so that you can further edit it the evil way:

(defun my-evil-last-match-to-region ()
  (interactive)
  (evil-visual-select evil-ex-search-match-beg evil-ex-search-match-end))

You could bind it to t (or f), which are keys with similar functionality that I guess most users do not use both:

(define-key evil-normal-state-map (kbd "t") 'my-evil-last-match-to-region)

Subsequently, you can edit it the evil way using e.g. d, U, c. Or you could "specify the end/beginning of the match" using l/oh.