Utilizing Alternative Delimiters in Vim’s Substitution Command

Vim’s :s command lets you use substitution with regular expressions. While / is the common delimiter, you can use other characters (except for \, ", |).

Examples

Standard Substitution

:s/foo/bar/g

Same substitution with # as delimiter

:s#foo#bar#g

Using a different delimiter lets you avoid escaping slashes in patterns like file paths.

Simplifying File Path Substitution

With Escaping Slashes

:s/\/User\/local\/bin\//\/usr\/sbin\//g

Using # as Delimiter

:s#/User/local/bin/#/usr/sbin/#g