Happy New Year! Let’s get 2017 started right with some Vim tips to increase your productivity when refactoring code on projects. Today we’re focusing on finding and replacing across your project directory.

Vim doesn’t have built-in commands for project-wide search and replace, but it does provide the building blocks for us to compose our own.

Easy mode: greplace.vim

Of course somebody’s already tackled this problem in the vibrant Vim ecosystem; Yan Pritzker has modified an original plugin by Yegappan Lakshmanan to create a full-featured solution in greplace. I’m basically rehashing greplace’s readme, but to use:

1. Type :Gsearch along with your search term, hit enter and get a buffer window full of your search results.
2. Make replacements inside this buffer using vim’s familiar %s/search/replace/.
3. Call :Greplace to make changes across all files.
4. Save changes across all files with :wall

This solution is great for me, and somewhat replaces the one thing I miss most about emacs: dired.

If you’re a glutton for punishment, and are looking for the manual way to find and replace across a project in Vim, look no further than below.

Hard mode: full manual

Honestly, hard mode isn’t too hard nowadays. Before, vimcasts had an entire episode dedicated to find and replace across projects, with the best option involving a bit of vimscript to allow for writing only to files that contained the search results (instead of writing to every file within the project).

With the introduction of Vim 8, we now have the ability to iterate over our quickfix window and make changes (essentially what greplace was doing above). Here’s an example to show what I mean:

:arga **/*
:grep! /Old/g ##
:cdo %s/Old/New/ge | update

The first command, :arga **/*, adds every file in the directory to the arguments list. The next line, :grep! /new/g ##, adds every instance of our search term, “Old”, into the quickfix (I’m using grep! with the bang at the end so the first instance of the search doesn’t get opened). Last we have the new :cdo %s/Old/New/ge | update. :cdo acts on every file in the quickfix; the %s/Old/New/ge searches through these files and replaces globally (the e at the end supresses errors resulting from not matching in some files), and the update saves all files found.

This isn’t too big of a hassle, and can be further simplified with ack.vim:

:Ack foo
:cdo %s/foo/bar/ge | update

Not bad at all!