Multiple files search and replace in vim

Many people assume that vim is a dumb editor after they see it for the first time and they start to ask how can I do X like my current editor is doing it. And that’s a mistake, because editing in vim is a different way of thinking. I did this mistake when I was first learning too, one of those questions that seems to be very simple is, how can I do search & replace in multiple files in vim.

The typical way of doing this in most editors is something like clicking CTRL/CMD+SHIFT+F or something which presents you with three fields to add your search query string, the string you want to replace it with & an optional field for filetype/extension. Then click Enter & you are done.

Simple, yes. Easy, yes. Powerful, not really. Doing multiple files search & replace is actually very easy & straightforward in vim (and doesn’t require any plugins) but it’s extremely powerful.

When you use vim (or even Emacs) your CLI is part of your editor, this means that you can use anything that you have installed in your $PATH, and for anyone who have some decent knowledge about the UNIX philosophy or how the CLI works & how powerful it is, they will know that your imagination is the limit.

What I’m going to show here is just the basic idea of how to do a search & replace in vim, the rest is up to you…

Let’s assume you have a comment in each of your files that has the phrase I hate vim & you want to change it to I love vim, here is how you can do this in 2 steps using :args & :argdo commands

First step,

:args `grep --recursive --files-with-matches 'I hate vim' .`

" can be shorter

:args `grep -r -l 'I hate vim' .`

What will happen here is that the command inside the backticks will run & the results will be evaluated & passed to :args which in turn open vim buffers from the list of files that this command will return. One caveat here is that the string you are searching for must be inside single quotes, not double quotes.

The powerful part here that you are not tied to grep or any other command, you can use rg, ag, pt, ack, grep or even git grep. Any command that will return a list of files to vim will work. vim is just a consumer here.

Second & last step, now that you have multiple buffers opened with your search results you need to do your replace action on them. Also, optionally save the files or do something else. If you type :args alone now you will see a list a of the buffers in your arglist (argumnet list), so to run commands on an arglist you need to use :argdo command to do this, in our case we want to replace a string with another. So we will do this

:argdo %s/I hate vim/I love vim/g | update

Think of :argdo as a map function that takes an iterator to loop over a list applying this iterator on each item of the list, because that’s exactly how it works. :argdo <iterator>. Here our iterator is vim’s substitute command %s/<query>/<replace>/flags so I’m just saying find the string I hate vim & replace it with I love vim with the global flag g on, to replace all instances of the string. The | update part is simply telling vim to save the files. You can do other things if you want before saving.

In short I tend to think about vim’s search & replace with :args & :argdo as functional composition that looks something like this agrdo(args(filter(query)), iterator) which when you look at it this way helps you a lot more than trying to think of it in terms of commands to remember or execute.

What I didn’t mention here that if you know regex you can do crazy stuff here, because all these grep programs supports Regex & vim also supports it. And as always :help or :h is your friend. So read :h args, :h argdo, :h :substitute for more info.