In buffer search

There are several stratergies for searching in vim. For searching within the buffer the / and ? normal commands exist which take in a search pattern. The ignorecase, smartcase and infercase options affects the matching for the above normal commands. I additionally install the wincent/loupe plugin which enhances the buffer searchers.

Project wide search

For searching in a project or across several files there are several options. First is the :vimgrep <pattern> <files> command which accepts vim regex for the search pattern and glob patterns for the files to search. The downside is that it is not recursive by default, although **/*.filetype does the trick (but needs to be specified every time).

The next option is the :grep command which invokes the grep command. Problem is that it does not ignore dotfiles or binaries by default. The following snippet uses the wildignore option to exclude files when calling grep (assuming wildignore is properly configured). Found on [[https://vi.stackexchange.com/a/8858][stackoverflow]].

~/.vimrc

let &grepprg='grep -n -R --exclude=' . shellescape(&wildignore) . ' $*'

Customising the grep program

The grepprg and grepformat options allows us to specify a grep command and output format of out liking. I like to use ripgrep as an alternative to grep since it ignores dotfiles and binaries by default.

~/.vimrc

if executable('rg')
    set grepprg=rg\ --vimgrep\ --no-heading\ --smart-case
    set grepformat=%f:%l:%c:%m,%f:%l:%m
endif

Tiny downside which bugs me with the above two solutions is that every search takes away focus from the active splits and shows the search results in a temporary buffer before populating the quickfix list.

Finally, the vim-fugitive plugin provides a :Ggrep <pattern> <glob> command which uses git-grep under the hood. The upside is that only files tracked by git are searched.

Personally, I like to keep external dependencies to a minimum. Since vim-fugitive is pretty much a must have, I prefer a combination of modifying the grepprg to ignore files and directories specified by wildignore and :Ggrep.