Search and Replace with Capture Groups

Once you get comfortable with :%s for searching and replacing across an entire file, you can start to unlock more power by exploiting Vim's rich regular expression handling. Coming from a GUI background, you might be tempted to look for a plugin to solve a seemingly general problem. However, a deeper knowledge of regular expressions may be all you need.

Here’s an example: bluMyst on reddit wanted to know how to generalise search and replace to add \n" to lines that start with printf(. The solution suggested by "who00oot" was capture groups:

Use capture groups. Search for (printf("[^"]+) and replace with $1\n (you may have to escape).

Then “dhruvasagar” suggested \zs and \ze. These are known as atoms, and you can read about them in :help \ze and :help \zs. The example for \ze in Vim's documentation is end\ze\(if\|for\) matches the "end" in "endif" and "endfor" -- this would allow you to avoid other words that start with "end", like "ended".