One feature of Notepad++, which I find really useful and haven't found elsewhere, is the highlighting of other text that is identical to the one currently selected.
Is there something similar possible with vi(m)? (Of course, there is. But how do I achieve it?) That is, any of those:
If I am in Visual Mode and have text selected: Highlight identical text
If I have searched /foo, highlight all instances of foo.
If I am at the beginning of a string (series of characters, numbers or underscores), highlight all other matching strings (prefered solution).
The last one is similar to the closing parentheses matching and IMHO the most useful.
Edit: For my second use case, I found a solution (that is, Google found it...):
:set hls
However, the others remain.