Tip 108: Call grep Without Leaving Vim

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Using grep from the Command Line

For example:

$ grep -n Waldo *
department-store.txt:1:Waldo is beside the boot counter.
goldrush.txt:6:Waldo is studying his clipboard.
goldrush.txt:9:The penny farthing is 10 paces ahead of Waldo.

• -n: include the line number in the printed output.
• specify line number in vim:

e.g.

# open goldrush.txt at line 9
$ vim goldrush.txt +9

Calling grep from Inside Vim

References:

# If you open the file in vim,
# then you can \"ayy@a the next line to execute the vim command: 
:h :grep

For example:

:grep Waldo *

• Vim parses the result and builds a quickfix list from them.
• We can navigate through the result by :cnext/:cprev
• Vim automatically include the -n flag.