Nothing is needed if you want to search for the word under the cursor, just press *. To search for visually selected text, put this line in your vimrc: vnoremap // y/" The :vnoremap command maps // in visual mode to run the commands y/ " which copies the visually selected text, then starts a search command and pastes the copied text into the search. represents Ctrl-R and represents carriage return (Enter). Note that this mapping will search selected text as a regular expression. Thus certain characters like '.' ([. vnoremap // 'y/\V'.escape(@",'\').''