Interactive grep with Vim

03 Jul 2018

Did you know that you can use grep from inside vim? Give it a try :grep nologin /etc/passwd, then you open the quickfix with :cw where you can navigate through the results.

I use grep a lot, usually in this format grep -rn <PATTERN> . --include *.<EXTENSION>. This is fast, and powerfull, and with vim I can jump directly to the results. The problem is that typing this everytime is anoying. So I wrote a simple command to help me out. It will ask for a pattern and grep with defined arguments.

In this example I was greping ansible playbooks, so I used the *.yml extension.

:command! -nargs=0 G exec 'grep -rn  ' input('Grep for: ') '. --include \*.yml'

Cheers