Comments on Ibrahim Ahmed: Vim: Find and replace text across files

I was looking for a better S&R method over files. ...

2009-11-18T12:37:02.461-08:00

I was looking for a better S&R method over files. Vim user of 6 years and have never used argsdo... Excellent!

Thanks for this post. I've been using Vim for only...

2009-10-21T19:20:03.648-07:00

Thanks for this post. I've been using Vim for only about a month now but everyday I try to learn something new about it. Today I stumbled upon this post and i'm excited to try it out. Also, thanks for @antipode for the great script.

Cheers!

Thanks!

2009-09-24T05:40:13.913-07:00

Thanks!

السلام عليكم لكم انا سعيد برؤية مدونتك هذه - هي ا...

2009-04-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

السلام عليكم

لكم انا سعيد برؤية مدونتك هذه - هي اول مدونة بهذا الشكل الإحترافي التي اجدها مكتوبة بواسطة عربي. كنت ابحث عن معلومة حول "في أي إم" ووجدت مدونتك. اتمنى لك التوفيق

حاتم - اميريكا

Thanks for this! Well explained. I've been using...

2009-02-17T12:03:00.000-08:00

Thanks for this! Well explained. I've been using vim for over a decade now, but there are many corners and abilities I've never really delved into before. This article came up after a simple google, and now I'm a better vimmer for it. Thanks again!

Here's a slightly more maintainable version of the...

2009-02-11T11:31:00.000-08:00

Here's a slightly more maintainable version of the find-rails script.

#!/bin/bash
if [ -d app ] && [ -d config ] && [ -d script ] && [ -d vendor ]
then
find . \
-name '*.sql' -prune -o \
-name '*.csv' -prune -o \
-name '*.swp' -prune -o \
-name '*.txt' -prune -o \
-name 'schema.rb' -prune -o \
-path './tmp' -prune -o \
-path './log' -prune -o \
-path './vendor' -prune -o \
-path '*/.svn' -prune \
-o -type f -print
else
echo "Oops! `pwd` doesn't look like a Rails directory!"
exit 1
fi

I've noticed that you can run any arbitrary shell ...

2009-02-11T11:08:00.000-08:00

I've noticed that you can run any arbitrary shell command with args.

For example, this coughs up all rb files in your current directory:

:args `ls *.rb`

So, if you have a script like this:

#!/bin/bash
if [ -d app ] && [ -d config ] && [ -d script ] && [ -d vendor ]
then
find . -name '*.sql' -prune -o -name '*.csv' -prune -o -path './log' -prune -o -path './vendor' -prune -o -path '*/.svn' -prune -o -type f -print
else
echo "Oops! `pwd` doesn't look like a Rails directory!"
exit 1
fi

... and supposing you call it find-rails and you put it in your path, then you can run:

:args `find-rails`

... and you get your whole project tree for handy search-and-replace. The script excludes vendor, svn, log, plus sql files and csv files (if you have any). Also, the script will choke if you're not currently in a rails directory (if you try to run it, vim will produce the cryptic message "E79: Cannot expand wildcards"). This is by design, since a find in the wrong directory can come up with a colossal number of files.

Run :pwd in vim to see your current directory. Do :Rcd (if you're using vim-rails) or whatever to switch to the appropriate rails directory.

Salt to taste.

Fantastic - very good description, just saved me h...

2009-01-17T10:13:00.000-08:00

Fantastic - very good description, just saved me hours. Thanks!

Great! Pretty useful thingThanks.

2009-01-12T02:27:00.000-08:00

Great! Pretty useful thing
Thanks.

Very useful, thanks!

2008-08-29T02:15:00.000-07:00

Very useful, thanks!

Yes, thanks for this. I've been using vim for year...

2008-07-29T10:45:00.000-07:00

Yes, thanks for this. I've been using vim for years. Perhaps I should be embarrassed for not knowing how to do this already, but mostly I'm just happy that I now can. Yay!

Cool. This is pretty useful, thank you.

2008-07-09T08:05:00.000-07:00

Cool. This is pretty useful, thank you.

This is a very nice overview of this technique. Th...

2008-04-04T08:58:00.000-07:00

This is a very nice overview of this technique. Thanks for posting it!