It actually increments each word it finds, so while most words will turn to "1", "356" will become "357". I have to imagine this ending up in the blog is the re

It actually increments each word it finds, so while most words will turn to "1", "356" will become "357". I have to imagine this ending up in the blog is the result of a copy-paste mistake, a LLM hallucination, or something similar. Others have commented on built-in vim functionality for counting words, but assuming the author copy-pasted a similar looking command, they may have intended something like: :%s/\w\+//gn Knowing that the n flag will return a count instead of doing the substitute may be useful to know, but I personally don't need a search count very often. Knowing that you can execute a vimscript expression on each search match using \= is also cool and I was unaware of such functionality. https://vimhelp.org/change.txt.html#sub-replace-expression https://vimhelp.org/change.txt.html#sub-replace-expression