What is a shorthand?

In the vim command s/blah/meh/g, what do the s and g stand for? Are they shorthand for a longer word?

• If not, what's a good mnemonic to remember them as?

• Answer:

  Both "s" and "g" come from sed(1). The "s" stands for substitute and the "g" for global. The command "sed s/blah/meh/g" would replace all occurrences of "blah" with "meh" in the file, as opposed to "sed s/blah/meh/" which would just replace the first occurrence (if any) on each line. Vim's s command has inherited this flag, although it doesn't really mean global; it just means to replace all the occurrences on the current line, as opposed to simply the first one on the line. If you want truly global scope, use :%s rather than :s. (The % works with other commands too; for example :%d will cut the entire file.)