Combining :vimgrep with git ls-files
The vimgrep command uses Vim’s native regular expressions to search the contents of multiple files. There are several ways that we can specify the list of files to look inside, including * and ** wildcards. It would be handy if we could instruct vimgrep to look inside all of the files in the current project, excluding those listed in the .gitignore file. That’s where the git ls-files command comes in.
Run git help ls-files and you’ll find the short summary:
Show information about files in the index and the working tree
We can easily get a list of all of the files tracked in a git repository by running:
git ls-files
If we wanted to search the contents of those files with vimgrep, we could wrap the git command in a backtick expression:
:vimgrep /{pattern}/g `git ls-files`
Alternatively, we could use the git ls-files command to populate the arglist. Then we could use the special symbol ## as the final argument for the vimgrep command:
:args `git ls-files`
:vimgrep /{pattern}/g ##
The ## symbol is expanded to represent the filepath of each buffer in the arglist. Episode #42 of Vimcasts goes into more detail on populating the arglist, and Episode #44 of Vimcasts goes into more detail on how to search multiple files with :vimgrep.
Watch out: git ls-files omits untracked files
There’s one thing to watch out for if you use this technique: git ls-files only lists files in the index and working tree. The command is blind to untracked files. In other words, if you create a new file, it won’t show up in the output of git ls-files until you run:
git add path/to/newfile
You can view the list of untracked files by running git ls-files --others.
There’s always git-grep too
Of course, git also provides the git-grep command, and the [fugitive][] plugin provides a :Ggrep wrapper for it. Episode 35 covers :Ggrep in more detail. Even so, it’s handy to know that git ls-files can be combined with vimgrep, for those times when you’ve got a complex Vim regular expression, and you want to test it against multiple files.
