searching through multiple files with vim

Just as a reminder to myself and to everyone looking for a short and easy answer to get a quick vim project search going:

• brew install the_silver_searcher (this is an amazingly fast file searcher)
• download and configure the vim ack plugin
• enter the following code in vimrc file to enable ag as default for ack

if executable('ag')
let g:ackprg = 'ag --vimgrep'
endif

• :Ack TIMESTAMP to find the word TIMESTAMP in any file in the current directory
• :cn for next and :cp for previous hit
• install vim-unimpaired for access to shortkeys [q and ]q for jumping through hits

fallback

Ofcourse, you could also use vimgrep which will work without installing any plugins but is a lot slower:

:vimgrep <searchterm> **/*.<fileextension>

• e.g. :vimgrep TIMESTAMP *.* to find the word TIMESTAMP in any file in the current directory
• e.g. :vimgrep /\v\d{5}/g **/*.md to recursively find all 5 number strings in any markdown file in the current project