To highlight all search matches, set the following option:

:set hlsearch

With the defaults, setting this option causes all text matching the current search
to be highlighted using the Search highlight group, which adds a yellow background
to the current highlighting. See :help hl-Search, or type :hi Search to see what
color you have it set to. You can easily change the default highlighting with, for
example, :hi Search guibg=LightBlue.

To disable the highlighting temporarily, enter (this is a command, not an option):

:nohlsearch

This command (which can be abbreviated to :noh) removes the highlighting for the
current search. The highlighting returns for the next search.

If you do this often, put a mapping in your vimrc, like this:

" Press Space to turn off highlighting and clear any message already displayed.
:nnoremap <silent> <Space> :nohlsearch<Bar>:echo<CR>

To disable highlighting completely, even after a subsequent search, use:

:set nohlsearch

If you want to be able to enable/disable highlighting quickly, you can map a key to
toggle the hlsearch option:

" Press F4 to toggle highlighting on/off, and show current value.

:noremap <F4> :set hlsearch! hlsearch?<CR>

Or, press return to temporarily get out of the highlighted search.

:nnoremap <CR> :nohlsearch<CR><CR>

Highlighting can be enabled on Vim startup, when reading the viminfo file. Add the
following to your vimrc if you want Vim to start with no search highlighting:

:set viminfo^=h

Highlight matches without movingEdit

It can be useful to highlight the word under the cursor like *, but without jumping
to the next match. Then you can see the search highlights on the current screen,
without any scrolling. Move to the first match (ggn), last (GN), next (n) or
previous (N) as usual.

One procedure would be to type *`` (search for next occurrence of word, then jump
back to the original position). Following is another procedure that won't flicker
the screen when the search would require scrolling.

The technique is to assign the wanted pattern to the search register (@/), and to
set the 'hlsearch' option (abbreviated as 'hls'). For example, these commands
highlight every whole word matching "the":

:let @/='\<the\>'
:set hls
The following map uses the above technique so that pressing F8 will highlight all
occurrences of the current word:

:nnoremap <F8> :let @/='\<<C-R>=expand("<cword>")<CR>\>'<CR>:set hls<CR>

Here is how to do the same for visually selected text:

set guioptions+=a
function! MakePattern(text)
let pat = escape(a:text, '\')
let pat = substitute(pat, '\_s\+$', '\\s\\*', '')
let pat = substitute(pat, '^\_s\+', '\\s\\*', '')
let pat = substitute(pat, '\_s\+', '\\_s\\+', 'g')
return '\\V' . escape(pat, '\"')
endfunction
vnoremap <silent> <F8> :<C-U>let @/="<C-R>=MakePattern(@*)<CR>"<CR>:set hls<CR>

The script starts by adding the 'a' flag to 'guioptions' so that visually selecting
text automatically places the text in the clipboard (register *) – that only works
on some systems (:help "*). The function replaces all whitespace strings (space,
tab, newline) with a pattern that finds any amount of whitespace. For example,
selecting "foo bar" and pressing F8 will highlight each of the two occurrences in:

"foo bar" and "foo

bar"

Another approach is to use the following to map the Enter key (<CR>) so that
pressing Enter toggles highlighting for the current word on and off:

let g:highlighting = 0
function! Highlighting()
if g:highlighting == 1 && @/ =~ '^\\<'.expand('<cword>').'\\>$'
let g:highlighting = 0
return ":silent nohlsearch\<CR>"
endif
let @/ = '\<'.expand('<cword>').'\>'
let g:highlighting = 1
return ":silent set hlsearch\<CR>"
endfunction
nnoremap <silent> <expr> <CR> Highlighting()

After sourcing the above, move the cursor to a word then press Enter to highlight
all occurrences of that word (the cursor is not moved). Press Enter again to clear
the highlighting. It works by setting the search register so pressing n or N will
search forwards or backwards for the word. The <expr> mapping (see :help :map-
<expr>) means that the text returned by Highlighting() is executed as a command.
That is necessary because commands that affect the current search highlighting are
ignored when executed inside a function. The global variable g:highlighting is used
to track whether highlighting is active as there appears to be no way to detect
that using Vim script. The operator =~ is used to check whether the contents of the
search register (@/) matches the pattern to search for the exact current word; it
uses a regular expression for the match so that the current setting of 'ignorecase'
is used (when set, highlighting a word like "example" will also highlight
"Example").

:%s/search/replace/g
for confirmation add c
:%s/search/replace/gc

search and replace more than 1 word

:%s/Kang\\|Kodos/alien/gc