Even though your file might not be that long, it can still be a pain to find something you are looking for. Vim has several ways to help you find what you are looking for.
Find next occurrence of a word
Search for word under cursor
Find next occurrence of a word
Search for a word by executing the following command in normal mode:
?someWord
The command searches backwards in the file for the first occurrence of the word after the question mark. If you are at the end of the file, this is the perfect way to search for a word, but if you were at the beginning of the file it would make more sense to search forward in the file. This is done by exchanging the question mark for a slash:
/someWord
The word might be in the file several times, and maybe the first place you found wasn't the place you were looking for. No worries, you simply need to press n to go to the next occurrence of the word in the direction of the search. If you would rather change direction, then simply press N instead, and it will instead find the preceding occurrence of the word.
If you want to do the same search again, simply use ?? or // instead of writing the entire word again.
Search for word under cursor
If you are already near one occurrence of the word you are looking for, but it is just not the right one, or maybe you want to look through all places where a certain word is used, and the word is already written, why use extra key presses on writing the word again? Vim has just the right commands for you. Place the cursor on or just in front of the word you want to search for and press either one of the following two keys in normal mode:
#
*
The first one searches for the previous occurrence of the word under the cursor, and the second one searches for the next occurrence of the word. Pressing the key multiple times jumps to the next/previous occurrence of the word, over and over again. This makes it really fast to jump through all occurrences of the word.
Maybe your word isn't actually a complete word, but just a part of a word. Vim also has a command for this. Simply press the following key combination in normal mode:
g#
g*
Now Vim does not just jump to the next occurrence of the word, but also to any occurrences where the word is part of another word. For example, placing the cursor on the word "foo" and pressing g# will make Vim jump to the next "foo", in both "foobar" and "food."
Comments
in normal mode:
/phone\>
will search for phone with word boundry at the end so it will match telephone but fail phonebooth
in normal mode:
/\<phone
will match phonebooth but fail telephone
and in normal mode:
/\<phone\>
will match phone only :)