How do I run a full-buffer substitution without disturbing marks, jumplist, or search history?

Explanation

Large substitutions are efficient, but they often leave side effects: your last search changes, your jumplist gets noisy, and marks can shift in ways that break your navigation flow. Vim command modifiers let you prevent that. By combining :lockmarks, :keepjumps, and :keeppatterns, you can do structural edits while preserving editor context for the next task.

How it works

• :lockmarks prevents certain commands from updating marks while they run
• keepjumps avoids adding jump entries caused by the command
• keeppatterns keeps your current search register (@/) unchanged
• %s/foo/bar/ge runs the substitution across the full buffer
• g replaces all matches per line, and e suppresses "pattern not found" errors

This combination is especially helpful in long files where you depend on mark/jump history for orientation.

Example

You are in the middle of a debugging session, with marks and search state already set, and need to rename an identifier in the current file. Run:

:lockmarks keepjumps keeppatterns %s/OldClient/NewClient/ge

Before:

OldClient.connect()
if OldClient.ready?
  OldClient.run()
end

After:

NewClient.connect()
if NewClient.ready?
  NewClient.run()
end

Your existing / pattern and jump navigation remain intact.

Tips

• Add | update if you want to write only when modified
• Use a visual range ('<,'>) instead of % for partial-file changes
• Prefer this pattern in macros/scripts where context preservation matters