Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 97

Find and Replace Across Multiple Files

The substitute command operates on the current file. So what do we do if we want to make the same substitution throughout an entire project? Although this scenario is common, Vim doesn’t include a dedicated command for project-wide find and replace. We can get this functionality by combining a few of Vim’s primitive commands that operate with the quickfix list.

As a demonstration, we’ll use the refactor-project directory, which you can find in the source files that come distributed with this book. It contains the following files, reproduced here with their contents:

refactor-project/
  about.txt
  Pragmatic Vim is a hands-on guide to working with Vim.

  credits.txt
 Pragmatic Vim is written ...