Question

When using Vim, and given a directory filled with code (e.g. ~/trunk/) with a number of sub-directories, is there a way to grep/search for instances of text/regexes across the entire source code?

At the moment I use:

:lcd ~/trunk :grep 'pattern' *.py */*.py */*/*.py */*/*/*.py 

(Obviously I’m limiting this to Python files, which is a different issue, but it’s noteworthy that ideally I’d like to limit the searches to files with specific extensions.)

Answer 1

:vimgrep 'pattern' ~/trunk/**/*.py :copen 20 

If you have quite a big project I’d recommend to you to use cscope and vim plugins. Here is one designed to handle big projects: SourceCodeObedience

There is a brief description of how to grep text using SourceCodeObedience.