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How to grep a code base in Vim?
You can move through this list of Quickfix windows using the :colder and :cnewer commands. With these grep features and Quickfix window history Vim can be used as an rudimentary IDE to examine a code base: use the grep commands to search for text (variables, methods or classes) and jump to them.
Where do I find the results of vimgrep?
The results from the vimgrep command are collected in the quickfix list. We can traverse them with the following commands: The square-bracket mappings are not built-in to Vim, but are added by Tim Pope’s unimpaired plugin (which I recommend). I reach for vimgrep when I want to use Vim’s built-in regex engine.
How to get vimgrep to highlight all matches?
(vimgrep doesn’t seem to highlight all the matches like normal / search does, but you can get this by doing the search with / first to make the highlights, then doing :vimgrep //g % and using the quickfix list to navigate the results.) Like many vim commands it populates the quickfix list with the search results.
How to search for a file in Vim?
We can use the :vimgrep command to populate the quickfix list with search results from the current file: The % character is a special symbol, which represents the filepath of the active buffer. The {pattern} field behaves more or less as you would expect. You can supply any pattern that would work with Vim’s standard search command.
What’s the difference between vimgrep and lvimgrepa?
(Also see :vimgrepa below.) lvimgrep is the same as vimgrep but populates the current window’s location list with the search results instead of the quickfix list. So you have to use location list commands to navigate through results (e.g. :lnext and :lprev instead of :cnext and :cprev ).
How does vimgrep search in the current file?
Unlike normal within-file search, vimgrep (or rather, the quickfix list) tells you which match you’re on (e.g. 2 of 5 ). If you want to search within the current file but have this feature, tell vimgrep to search the current file with %: