Counting occurrences in vim

Question

In order to know how many times a pattern exists in current buffer, I do:

:%s/pattern-here/pattern-here/g

It gives the number of occurrences of the pattern, but is obviously cumbersome and also has the side-effect of setting the 'changed' status.

Is there a more elegant way to count?

Answer 1

Add the 'n' flag to avoid the substitution.

This is described as an official tip.

Answer 2

:!cat %| grep -c "pattern"

It's not exactly vim command, but it will give you what you need from vim.
You can map it to the command if you need to use it frequently.

Answer 3

This vimscript displays search with "At match #N out of M matches".