Mastering Vim

Searching across files

Vim has two commands to help you search across files, :grep and :vimgrep:

• :grep uses system grep, and is a great tool if you're already familiar with how grep works
• :vimgrep is a part of Vim, and might be easier to use if you are not already familiar with grep

We'll focus on :vimgrep, since the grep tool is outside the scope of this book.

The syntax is as follows: :vimgrep <pattern> <path>. pattern could either be a string or a Vim-flavored regular expression. path will often be a wildcard; use ** as a path to search recursively (or **/*.py to restrict by filetype).

Let's try searching for a calc substring in our code base:

:vimgrep animal **/* .py

This will take us to the first match, displaying the number of matches ...