Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Chapter 18Search Project-Wide with grep, vimgrep, and Others

Vim’s search command is great for finding all occurrences of a pattern within a file. But what if we want to find matches across an entire project? Then we have to scan many files. Traditionally, this has been the domain of grep, a dedicated Unix tool.

In this chapter, we’ll discover Vim’s :grep command, which allows us to call an external program without leaving our editor. While this command calls grep by default (when available), we’ll see that it can easily be customized to outsource the task to other dedicated programs, such as ack.

One down side to using external programs is that their regex syntax may be incompatible with the one we use for most Vim searches. We’ll see ...