Search and replace in Vim across all the project files

Question

I\'m looking for the best way to do search-and-replace (with confirmation) across all project files in Vim. By \"project files\" I mean files in the current directory, some

Answer 1

Populate :args from a shell command

It's possible (on some operating systems¹)) to supply the files for :args via a shell command.

For example, if you have ack² installed,

:args `ack -l pattern`

will ask ack to return a list of files containing 'pattern' and put these on the argument list.

Or with plain ol' grep i guess it'd be:

:args `grep -lr pattern .`  

You can then just use :argdo as described by the OP:

:argdo %s/pattern/replacement/gce

Populate :args from the quickfix list

Also check out nelstrom's answer to a related question describing a simple user defined command that populates the arglist from the current quickfix list. This works great with many commands and plugins whose output ends up in the quickfix list (:vimgrep, :Ack³, :Ggrep⁴).

The sequence to perform a project wide search could then be done with:

:vimgrep /pattern/ **/*
:Qargs 
:argdo %s/findme/replacement/gc

where :Qargs is the call to the user defined command that populates the arglist from the quickfix list.

You'll also find links in the ensuing discussion to simple plugins that get this workflow down to 2 or 3 commands.

Links

1. :h {arglist} - vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/editing.html#{arglist}
2. ack - betterthangrep.com/
3. ack.vim - github.com/mileszs/ack.vim
4. fugitive - github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive