Searching with / and ?

Most times one of the fastest ways to navigate somewhere is to search for a particular string. Vim allows you to search for a match by typing in / (which puts you in command-line mode) followed by a search string. Once you hit Enter, your cursor will move to the first match.

Cycling through the matches in the same buffer can be done by pressing n to go to the next match and N to the previous match.

A useful option for searching is set hlsearch (consider setting it in your .vimrc file), since it highlights every match on the screen. For example, this is how running /kind in animal_farm.py looks with hlsearch enabled:

You can clear the highlights by executing :noh.

In case you want to search backwards, replace / with ?. This will also affect the way n and N will behave, showing a next backward match, and a previous backward match respectively.