Monday, April 27, 2009

Vim Update Many Files

Here's a really nice Vim trick I learned today and have already used twice.

I'll demonstrate it with an example. I wanted to go through all my .cs files and fix the formatting (they all had 4 spaces per tab and I wanted to update them to 2 spaces per tab).

First, I opened Vim and set the current directory to the root of my source folder.
:cd C:\blah\blah\source\code

Next, I told Vim to pull in all my .cs projects in the entire source tree.
:args .\**\*.cs

** means to go recursively down 30 directories (you can set the max depth, default is 30. Try :help ** for more).
Finally, I told it I wanted it to format each file, from beginning to end, using the "equalsprg" and then to save it.
:argdo exe "normal gg=G" | w

To break this down:
  • :argdo tells it to run the specified command on all "args", or all open files
  • exe tells it to execute the given command
  • normal runs the :normal command, which allows you to execute normal mode commands like motions, etc
  • gg goes to the top of the file, = formats the file, G goes to the end of the file
  • | chains commands together
  • w writes the file
Pretty awesome I thought.

Another common use of :argdo is to run a search and replace across many files. Open the files you want either with the :args command or from the command line. Then do:
:argdo %s/matchon/replacewith/ge | w


If this would require you to open a ridiculous number of files, most of which wouldn't have matches, then you should use the :vimgrep command instead. This will put only files that match your regex on the quickfix list. You can then move through them with :cnext and execute any commands you want. The downside here is that you have to execute your command over and over in each file.

3 comments:

  1. You mean you wanted to use two spaces for indentation, not two spaces per tab. If you actually used tabs you wouldn't have this problem.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You're right. I'd have other problems ;) But lets not start that argument...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Been using Vim for almost a year now. I was just in the dilemma if I should move on to a GUI editor like Komodo given their more user friendly approach on complicated tasks. It seems I was just complicating myself all this time.

    Thanks for the AWESOME post Kevin :)

    Kelvin

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