Pull word under cursor - vim tip

Pull word under the cursor into a command line(ex mode) or search by pressing ctrl-r ctrl-w

This is very useful for yanking long values into substitutions or into search without using the mouse.

Another way of pulling the word under cursor to search (forward,backward)

"shift *" is equivalent to /\<word under cursor\> (forward search)
"shift #" is equivalent to ?\<word under cursor\> (backward search)