Let's say I have many files:
for i in $(seq 1 1000)
do
if [ $((1 + RANDOM % 100)) -lt 2 ]
then
echo "needle" > $(uuid)
else
echo "haystack" > $(uuid)
fi
done
which I then edit with vim:
find . -type f | xargs -o vi --clean
I can search in these files via:
:vimgrep needle ##
or:
:grep needle ##
However, when I use the latter, vim does two things that I would like it to skip:
shows me the external command that it will execute, in this case pages of:
:!grep -n needle ./499553b6-615d-11ed-9ef7-5f9f4b37d6da ./484c2354-615d-11ed-94ff-a3a9a2d52531 ./49492e82-615d-11ed-af5d-5363f17c2e2b ./4ab7cc42-615d-11ed-8d84-4fd2cdf1942
c ./4ad4a132-615d-11ed-8af6-2f5cbf24f5de ./4c1f26c0-615d-11ed-b630-6bcbd445b4a1 ./4de4b948-615d-11ed-8e82-4f0c16b0065e <snip>
asks me to Press ENTER or type command to continue before starting to edit the matching files
How can I achieve this?
If you don't depend on specific features of your :help 'grepprg', then :help :vimgrep is your best choice because the work is done internally.
If you do, then you will have to use a different command because :help :grep shells out and it can't really be made to work silently. You might find mappings online that press the dreaded <CR> for you but they don't really fix anything.
The :help :cexpr family of commands is a less noisy alternative that allows you to use :help system() and thus remove both the shelling-out and the <CR> problem:
:cexpr system('grep -n needle ' .. expand('##'))
That's a lot to type, though, so you might want to turn that into a proper command or mapping.
Welcome to this particular rabbit hole.
Related
I'd like to map vim's 'keywordprg' to Dash, namely, use K to do !open dash://word-unser-curse.
Currently, I'm doing this:
:let &keywordprg '!open dash://'
but it says E34: No previous command.
from :h E34:
Any '!' in {cmd} is replaced with the previous
external command (see also 'cpoptions'). But not when
there is a backslash before the '!', then that
backslash is removed. Example: ":!ls" followed by
":!echo ! \! \\!" executes "echo ls ! \!".
Thus you have to escape ! in order to have vim treat as it is, otherwise vim tries to replace it with the "previous command", resulting in the error.
Additionally, I don't think you need that ! in your keywordprg. Vim calls it as an external command anyway (the default value is man, not !man).
Is there a way to limit :Ag output so it always takes one line and doesn't blow up the quickfix window?
At the moment it looks like this and it's awful. I can't see filenames, everything is super slow and just sucks:
Update For the record, I scrolled Quickfix window a bit to illustrate the point better. And while it is usable via :cn :cp, I would like to be able to quickly glance over the results with j k.
Looking over the man page, there does not seem to be any way to limit the output built into Ag itself.
Is there another way of limiting the line length? Actually, you do have the built in "cut" command in Linux, e.g. using it on the shell:
ag --column foo | cut -c 1-80
Limit all lines to 80.
Now we have to make ag.vim execute our specially crafted command, for which the g:agprg exists. So the first thing I thought of is this:
let g:agprg='ag --column \| cut -c 1-80' " doesn't work
The problem with this is that the ag.vim plugin just appends extra arguments to the end, and thus you end up executing something like ag --column | cut -c 1-80 something-i-searched-for. Is there a way to directly "insert" the arguments before the |?
One trick is to use a temporary shell function, like this:
f() { ag --column "$#" | cut -c 1-80 }; f something-i-search-for
Unfortunately, we still can't use this. ag.vim checks whether or not the first word is an actual command. So it complains that no executable by the name of "f()" exists. So my final solution:
let g:agprg='true ; f(){ ag --column "$#" \| cut -c 1-80 }; f'
As true always exists and doesn't do anything except return true, this works!
To your actual screenwidth instead of 80, you could use:
let g:agprg='true ; f(){ ag --column "$#" \| cut -c 1-'.(&columns - 6).' }; f'
I added the magic - 6 here to account for the extra characters Vim itself adds.
ag now supports a --width switch. rg has a similar --max-columns switch.
Assuming you are using this plugin. You should add this to your ~/.vimrc as specified by :h g:ag_qhandler
let g:ag_qhandler = 'copen 1'
However you can probably just do let :g:ag_qhandler = 'cc'. This will print the results at the in the bottom. When you move through the quickfix list via :cnext or :cprev it will print the current result as well.
For more help see:
:h g:ag_qhandler
:h :cope
Changing the geometry of the quickfix window won't help you fix your problem: the window is unusable not because of its size but because your search results are polluted by superfluous matches in minimized files.
Minimized JavaScript or CSS is the frontend development's equivalent of a binary and that kind of file should be ignored by search tools, indexing tools, file navigation tools and even version control tools, sometimes, because they are generally irrelevant.
Adding these lines to your ~/.agignore will make Ag search only in actual source files:
*.min*
*-min*
*_min*
*.min.*
bundle
min
vendor
tags
cscope.*
Adjust that list to your liking.
So far, I have been manually refactoring code by using the find-and-replace operation
%s:/stringiwanttoreplace/newstring/g
in vim.
But this is a slow and laborious process if I have stringiwanttoreplace in many files inside a specific directory.
My current/typical slow and laborious process involves a grep:-
grep -rn "stringiwanttoreplace" .
in my terminal to reveal all the locations/filenames where stringiwanttoreplace are; and now that I know which files contain stringiwanttoreplace, I will open each file one-by-one to perform the find-and-replace operation in each file.
Is there a more efficient workflow (in vim) to get this done?
CLARIFICATION: I would prefer a vim-based solution instead of a bash script/one-liner.
Here's the full sequence of commands that I would use:
/stringiwanttoreplace
:vimgrep /<c-r>// **
:Qargs
:argdo %s//newstring/g
:argdo update
In the first line, we search for the target pattern. That populates the last search pattern register (:help quote/), which means that we won't have to type it out in full again.
The :vimgrep command searches the entire project for the specified pattern. Type <c-r>/ as ctlr+r followed by / - this inserts the contents of the last search pattern register onto the command line. The first and last / symbols are delimiters for the search field. The trailing ** tells Vim to look inside every file and directory below the current directory.
At this point, the quickfix list will be populated with search matches from all matching files. :Qargs is a custom command, which populates the argument list with all of the files listed in the quickfix list. Here's the implementation:
command! -nargs=0 -bar Qargs execute 'args ' . QuickfixFilenames()
function! QuickfixFilenames()
" Building a hash ensures we get each buffer only once
let buffer_numbers = {}
for quickfix_item in getqflist()
let buffer_numbers[quickfix_item['bufnr']] = bufname(quickfix_item['bufnr'])
endfor
return join(values(buffer_numbers))
endfunction
Add that to your vimrc file.
Having run :Qargs, our argument list should now contain all of the files that include our target string. So we can run the substitution command with :argdo, to execute the command in each file. We can leave the search field of the substitution command blank, and it will automatically use the most recent search pattern. If you want, you could include the c flag when you run the substitution command, then you'll be prompted for confirmation.
Finally, the :argdo update command saves each file that was changed.
As #Peter Rincker pointed out, you should ensure that Vim's 'hidden' option is enabled, otherwise it will raise an error when you try to switch to another buffer before writing any changes to the active buffer.
Also, note that the last 3 commands can be executed in a single command line, by separating them with a pipe character.
:Qargs | argdo %s//replacement/gc | update
The :Qargs command is pinched from this answer (by me), which in turn was inspired by this answer by DrAl. A very similar solution was posted by #ib, which suggests to me that Vim should really implement something like :quickfixdo natively.
If you really want to do it in Vim you can follow the suggestions here.
You can call this from within Vim (:!find ...) but you don't need to:
find . -type f | xargs sed -i 's/stringiwanttoreplace/newstring/g'
Fine-tune the file selection with the dozens of parameters described in
man find
(e.g., replace only in HTML files: -name \*.html)
This solution will try to attempt the replacement in all files. You can filter that through grep before, but that is just doing twice the work for no gain.
By the way: sed uses almost the same syntax for regular expressions as Vim (stemming from the same history).
You could open all the files and type
:bufdo :s/stringiwanttoreplace/newstring/g
It performs the search/replace in all your buffers.
You don't need vim to do this, you can use command line tools. Using sed in a loop on the list of files to do this for you automatically. Something like this:
for each in `grep -l "stringiwanttoreplace" *` ;
do
cat $each | sed -e "s/stringiwanttoreplace/newstring/g" > $each
; done
vim7 has recursive grep built-in
:vimgrep /pattern/[j][g] file file1 file2 ... fileN
the result will be shown in a quickfix-window (:help quickfix)
to do the search recursively use the **-wildcard like
**/*.c to search through the current folder and recursively through all subdirectories.
I am using the Ack plugin in Vim, which helps me to quickly search for strings in my project. However, sometimes I want to replace all or some occurrences of the found strings. You can do some kind of global search and replace using the Vim arglist like this (source)
:
:args app/views/*/*
:argdo %s/, :expire.*)/)/ge | update
But instead of using args, I would prefer to do a search via Ack and then do the replace in all files that have been found. Is there a way to do it similar to the argdo command?
I've decided to use ack and perl to solve this problem outside of Vim so I could use the more powerful Perl regular expressions instead of the GNU subset. You could map this to a key stroke in your .vimrc.
ack -l 'pattern' | xargs perl -pi -E 's/pattern/replacement/g'
Explanation
ack
ack is an awesome command line tool that is a mix of grep, find, and full Perl regular expressions (not just the GNU subset). It's written in pure Perl, it's fast, it has match highlighting, it works on Windows and it's friendlier to programmers than the traditional command line tools. Install it on Ubuntu with sudo apt-get install ack-grep.
xargs
xargs is an old Unix command line tool. It reads items from standard input and executes the command specified followed by the items read for standard input. So basically the list of files generated by ack are being appended to the end of the perl -pi -E 's/pattern/replacement/g' command.
perl -pi -E
Perl is a programming language.
The -p option causes Perl to create a loop around your program which iterates over filename arguments.
The -i option causes Perl to edit the file in place. You can modify this to create backups.
The -E option causes Perl to execute the one line of code specified as the program. In our case the program is just a Perl regex substitution.
For more information on Perl command line options, see perldoc perlrun. For more information on Perl, see http://www.perl.org/.
Now, Vim has this new command cdo that will run the given command to each line of the quickfix list.
So you can use
:Ack pattern
:cdo s/pattern/newpattern/g
I don't believe there's a built in way of doing this, but it should be easy to make one.
What you need to do is create a command that calls a custom function. The function should then use the getqflist() function to get all of the entries in the quickfix list and exe to do the dirty work. Be careful what you pass as an argument!
" Define a command to make it easier to use
command! -nargs=+ QFDo call QFDo(<q-args>)
" Function that does the work
function! QFDo(command)
" Create a dictionary so that we can
" get the list of buffers rather than the
" list of lines in buffers (easy way
" to get unique entries)
let buffer_numbers = {}
" For each entry, use the buffer number as
" a dictionary key (won't get repeats)
for fixlist_entry in getqflist()
let buffer_numbers[fixlist_entry['bufnr']] = 1
endfor
" Make it into a list as it seems cleaner
let buffer_number_list = keys(buffer_numbers)
" For each buffer
for num in buffer_number_list
" Select the buffer
exe 'buffer' num
" Run the command that's passed as an argument
exe a:command
" Save if necessary
update
endfor
endfunction
You could using ack by this way
:args `ack -l User app/`
:argdo %s/, :expire.*)/)/ge | update
Or use ag
:args `ag -l User app/`
:argdo %s/, :expire.*)/)/gec | w
I use MacVim (activated with mvim in a shell). I pipe the results of ack to mvim:
mvim -f $(ack -l $#)
Then in MacVim, I search/replace using bufdo:
:bufdo %s/SEARCH/REPLACE/gce | update
Omit the c option if confirmation is not needed.
I'm using vim -d file1 file2 in order to see the differences between them. This works fine, but I want to ignore whitespace changes - they are irrelevant for source code files.
Vim help states that the following command will do the magic:
set diffopt+=iwhite
But unfortunately, this command only adds -b to diff tool command line, and that only ignores trailing whitespaces. The correct command line key for diff should be -w, to ignore all whitespace changes. But I can't find how to modify the diff command line directly from Vim. Of course I can compile a custom diff, or replace diff with diff.sh, but that looks kinda ugly :(.
Is there a better way to modify how Vim interacts with the diff tool for displaying file differences?
This implements what you want (taken from the diffexpr docs with -b changed to -w):
set diffopt+=iwhite
set diffexpr=DiffW()
function DiffW()
let opt = ""
if &diffopt =~ "icase"
let opt = opt . "-i "
endif
if &diffopt =~ "iwhite"
let opt = opt . "-w " " swapped vim's -b with -w
endif
silent execute "!diff -a --binary " . opt .
\ v:fname_in . " " . v:fname_new . " > " . v:fname_out
endfunction
... I'm still looking for a better diffexpr helper with respect to handling which lines map to which (GNU diff, even with -w instead of -b, is rather baffled by combining extra whitespace with minor edits like commented lines). Maybe diffchar?
Yes. Set the iwhite option as you did, but additionally, make diffexpr empty.
From the relevant section of the vim docs:
iwhite
Ignore changes in amount of white space. Adds
the "-b" flag to the "diff" command if
'diffexpr' is empty. Check the documentation
of the "diff" command for what this does
exactly. It should ignore adding trailing
white space, but not leading white space.
Note also that you can provide a custom diff command line by setting diffexpr. See the discussion on the vimdiff man page, in particular:
The 'diffexpr' option can be set to use something else than the standard
"diff" program to compare two files and find the differences.
When 'diffexpr' is empty, Vim uses this command to find the differences
between file1 and file2:
diff file1 file2 > outfile
Thanks ire, that helped me. I now only need to have this (simpler than what is proposed by Adam K) in my ~/.vimrc :
set diffopt+=iwhite
set diffexpr=""
And it does it... That is still the most powerfull diff tool I know of, far better than any other.
I know it's an antique question but for others like me who didn't know, this is now available:
:set diffopt+=iwhiteall
Adds the "-w" flag to the "diff" command if 'diffexpr' is empty.
See :h 'diffopt'
For those hitting "Invalid argument" doing set diffopt+=iwhite, try without the + like so:
set diffopt=iwhite
However, a more robust approach would be to set ignore whitespace while preserving existing options. Beware though, that the "Invalid argument" error is likely caused by one of those existing options not being supported. In my case it was the "internal" option therefore I needed to set options in the following order:
set diffopt-=internal
set diffopt+=iwhite
Or add the following to your .vimrc:
if &diff
set diffopt-=internal
set diffopt+=iwhite
endif
Credit to https://www.micahsmith.com/blog/2019/11/fixing-vim-invalid-argument-diffopt-iwhite/
Addressing an issue brought up in the comments of Adam Katz's solution:
Depending on the vim version and setup of the user, a silent command can neglect to redraw the screen after it is issued. I also encountered this problem, which arose whenever I executed :diffo after using the suggested diffexpr. My solution was to change the silent execute command to the following:
silent execute "!diff -a --binary " . opt .
\ v:fname_in . " " . v:fname_new . " > " . v:fname_out | redraw!
This forces a redraw after the command is issued.