Mastering Vim

Operations across files using arglist

Arglist allows you to perform the same operation on multiple files, without having to have them preloaded in buffers first.

Arglist provides a few commands, as follows:

• :arg defines the arglist.
• :argdo allows you to execute a command on all the files in the arglist.
• :args displays the list of files in the arglist.

For example, if we wanted to replace all instances of animal in every Python file (recursively), we would do the following:

:arg **/*.py:argdo %s/\<animal\>/creature/ge | update

This command work as follows:

• :arg <pattern> adds a set of files matching a pattern to the arglist (each argument in arglist also has a corresponding buffer).
• **/*.py is a wildcard for every .py file, recursively ...