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Integrating The Silver Searcher with Vim's 'grepprg'

 3 years ago
source link: https://blog.kiprosh.com/integrating-the-silver-searcher-with-vims-grepprg/
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Published on 2 June 2021 in vim

Integrating The Silver Searcher with Vim's 'grepprg' (without any plugins)

Vim has a command called :grep (:help :grep), which is used for searching plain text across the project. Internally it uses the *nix grep utility to perform the search. However, the grep utility is very slow, especially for larger projects, which means you might want to use something else like ag (follow the instructions given in the official repo for installation).

Understanding :grep

When we execute let's say :grep text_to_find in Vim, it will look at the value of the option called 'grepprg' (:help 'grepprg'), replace $* with text_to_find, and then pass it to the shell for execution. We can change the value of 'grepprg' to use ag instead of the default, which is grep.

Changing 'grepprg'

Add the following to your .vimrc file:

if executable('ag')
  set grepprg=ag\ --vimgrep\ $*
  set grepformat^=%f:%l:%c:%m
endif

Checking whether or not ag is installed in the system (:help executable()) before changing the value of 'grepprg' will allow us to safely copy the configuration to any other system where ag might not be available, without the fear of breaking Vim.

The --vimgrep option passed to ag makes it print the matches to the standard output in the %f:%l:%c:%m format (:help errorformat). Vim doesn't recognise this format by default, so we need to tell it explicitly. This is done using another option called 'grepformat' (:help 'grepformat') which already has a couple of defaults. We just need to add our own format at the very beginning using the ^= (:help :set^=) assignment operator. The reason we add our format to the very beginning is because otherwise one of the default values (%f:%l:%m) will match, resulting in Vim considering the column number and the actual match as part of %m. We need Vim to recognise the column number separately so that it can use the information to place the cursor at the proper column while navigating the searches.

Navigating the searches

You can now use Vim's quickfix list (:help quickfix.txt) to navigate your searches.


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