Using Grep from Inside Vim

"this is my rifle. there are many like it, but this one is mine." - rifleman’s creed

there are a thousand ways to grep over files. most developers i have observed keep a separate command line open just for searching. a few use an ide that has file search built in. personally, i use a couple of vim macros.

in vim, you can execute a cross-file search with something like :vimgrep /dostuff()/j ../**/*.c . i don’t know about you, but the first time i saw that syntax my brain simply refused.

instead, i have the following in my .vimrc file:

" opens search results in a window w/ links and highlight the matches
command! -nargs=+ grep execute 'silent grep! -i -r -n --exclude *.{json,pyc} . -e <args>' | copen | execute 'silent /<args>'
" shift-control-* greps for the word under the cursor
:nmap <leader>g :grep <c-r>=expand("<cword>")<cr><cr>

the first command is just a simple alias for the above mentioned native grep. like all custom commands, it must start with a capital letter (to differentiate it from native commands). you simply type :grep foobar and it will search in your current directory through all file extensions (except .json and .pyc -- you can add more to the blacklist).

it also displays the results in a nice little buffer window, which you can navigate through with normal hjkl keys, and open matches in the main editor window.

the second line is a key mapping that will grep for the word currently under the cursor. you can just navigate to a word and hit leader-g to issue the grep command.