Finding in Files

Using plugins to integrate external tools

Vim can integrate with your preferred tool for searching across files in the shell. It can be grep, ack, The Silver Searcher (ag), ripgrep (rg) or any other. That way, you can have in the editor the same features and speed that your command line search tool offers.

For example, ripgrep is very popular lately thanks to its sensible defaults and speed. To integrate it, you can use plugins like vim-ripgrep or fzf.vim.

For example, using the vim-ripgrep plugin, the following command populates the quickfix list:

:Rg <pattern>

Note that you can pass any pattern or parameters as you would when using ripgrep directly in the shell (although make sure to escape | in your patterns as \| so it is passed correctly to the tool).

As you will see next, integrating these tools manually is rather easy and using a plugins like vim-ripgrep or ack.vim is not strictly necessary. However, one advantage they provide is that they prevent the shell from being shown while the search is performed and they can open the quickfix window automatically after a search among other things.

Integrating internal tools manually

If you don't need the extra features additional plugins provide, integrating external search tools is very easy. The configuration option to do so is grepprg. For example, to configure ag, you can do:

set grepprg=ag\ --vimgrep

or to configure ripgrep:

set grepprg=rg\ --vimgrep

As you can see, many tools already provide some kind of parameter (typically --vimgrep) to configure the format of the output in such a way that Vim understands it. To make the configuration persist between sessions, remember to add that configuration option to your vemrc file.

To perform a search once the tool is configured, use :grep:

:grep <parameters>

Once executed the search, the results are stored in the quickfix list.

Using Vim built-in commands

Finally, you can also perform searches across files using the vimgrep command (or lvimgrep if you want to populate the location list window instead of the quickfix one). Its format is:

:vimgrep /<pattern>/ <glob-expression>

For instance, to search the string foo across all JSON files under the current directory, you can use:

:vimgrep /foo/ **/*.json

Note that <pattern> in this case uses Vim regular expression's syntax while, when an external tool is integrated, you use the syntax of the tool itself.

The advantage of the built-in command is that it doesn't require an external tool at all to work. The downside is that is extremely slow compared with the tools considered above. So if you have very few files to use in your search or you don't need the speed, :vimgrep can still be a good option.