Aprende-Vim/ch03_opening_and_searching_files.md

Abrir y buscar archivos

El objetivo de este capítulo es adentrarte en el modo de abrir y buscar archivos en Vim. Ser capaz de buscar rápidamente es una gran manera de aumentar tu productividad en Vim. Una de las razones por las que tardé en empezar a usar Vim era que no sabía cómo encontrar cosas rápidamente, como se hace en los editores de texto más populares.

Este capítulo está dividido en dos partes. En la primera parte, te enseñaré cómo abrir y buscar archivos sin necesidad de complementos extras. En la segunda parte, te enseñaré cómo abrir y buscar archivos con el complemento FZF.vim. Sientete libre para saltar a la sección que necesites aprender. Sin embargo, te recomiendo encarecidamente que des un repaso a todo el capítulo ya que siempre se aprende algo (o se recuerda algo olvidado). Dicho esto, ¡empezemos!

Abrir y editar archivos con :edit

:edit es la manera más simple de abrir un archivo en Vim.

:edit archivo.txt

• Si archivo.txt existe, abre archivo.txt en un buffer.
• Si archivo.txt no existe, crea un nuevo buffer para archive.txt.

El autocompletado del nombre (tab) funciona con :edit. Por ejemplo, si tu archivo está dentro de una carpeta controller de un proyecto en Rails como por ejemplo ./app/controllers/users_controllers.rb, puedes utilizar la tecla tab para ir expandiendo los términos rápidamente:

:edit a<tab>c<tab>u<tab>

:edit acepta comodines como argumentos. * reemplaza a cualquier archivo en la carpeta actual. Si solo estás buscando archivo con la extensión .yml en la carpeta actual, puedes ejecutar:

:edit *.yml<tab>

Después de presionar la tecla tabulador, Vim te mostrará una lista de todos los archivos .yml que existen en la carpeta actual para poder escoger el que queramos.

Puedes utilizar ** para buscar de manera recursiva. Si quieres buscar todos los archivos *.md en tu proyecto, pero no estás seguro de en qué carpeta está, puedes ejecutar lo siguiente:

:edit **/*.md<tab>

:edit puede ser utilizado para ejecutar netrw, el explorador nativo de Vim (del que trataremos más adelante en este capítulo). Para hacer eso, se debe dar al comando :edit un argumento como directorio en vez de un archivo. Por ejemplo:

:edit .
:edit test/unit/

:edit también acepta un comando externo (Ex) como argumento (trataré más adelante los comandos externos en capítulos posteriores) cuando va seguido por un signo +. Aquí hay algunos ejemplos:

• Para ir a la línea 5 del archivo (:5): :edit +5 /test/unit/helper.spec.js
• Para ir a la primera línea que contenga la cadena de texto "const" (/const): :edit +/const /test/unit/helper.spec.js
• Para eliminar todas las líneas vacías (:g/^$/d): :edit +g/^$/d test/unit/helper.spec.js

Buscando archivos con :find

Puedes buscar archivos con el comandos :find. Por ejemplo:

:find package.json
:find app/controllers/users_controller.rb

El autocompletado del nombre también funciona con el comando :find:

:find p<tab>                Para encontrar el archivo package.json
:find a<tab>c<tab>u<tab>    Para encontrar la ruta del archivo app/controllers/users_controller.rb

Quizás has notado que la sintáxis y el comportamiento del comando :find es similar al comando :edit. La diferencia es que :find encuentra un archivo en la ruta o path, mientras que :edit no lo hace.

Aprendamos un poco más sobre esta ruta o path. Una vez que aprendas cómo modificar tus rutas, :find puede convertirse en una herramienta de búsqueda muy potente. Para comprobar cuales son tus rutas, ejecuta:

:set path?

De manera predeterminada, quizás el resultado de ese comando sea algo parecido a esto:

path=.,/usr/include,,

Esto es lo que significa:

• . significa buscar en relación al directorio del archivo actual
• , significa buscar en el directorio actual
• /usr/include es un directorio.

La conclusión aquí es que puedes modificar tus propios caminos. Supongamos que esta es la estructura de tu proyecto:

▾ app/
  ▸ assets/
  ▾ controllers/
      application_controller.rb
      comments_controller.rb
      users_controller.rb
  ...

Si quieres ir al archivo users_controller.rb desde el directorio raíz, debes pasar por varios directorios (y pulsar un considerable número de veces la tecla tabulador). A veces solo te interesa el directorio controllers/, por lo que quieres buscar inmediatamente dentro de ese directorio sin necesidad de pasar antes por app/ y controllers/ cada vez que busque un archivo. path puede acortar ese viaje entre directorios.

Puedes añadir el directorio controllers/ a path mediante:

:set path+=app/controllers/

Ahora que tu ruta ha sido actualizada, cuando escribas :find u<tab>, Vim también buscará coincidencias dentro del directorio app/controllers/ de archivos que empiezen con "u".

Si tienes un directorio controllers/ anidado, como app/controllers/account/users_controller.rb, Vim no encontrará users_controllers. En su lugar es necesario añadir :set path+=app/controllers/** así el autocompletado podrá buscar users_controller.rb.

Podrás estar pensando en añadir los directorios del proyecto entero así cuando pulses tab, Vim buscará en cualquier lugar el archivo deseado, de esta manera:

:set path+=$PWD/**

$PWD hace referencia al directorio de trabajo actual. Si intentas añadir el proyecto entero a path para que así todos los archivos puedan ser buscado al presionar el tabulador tab, aunque esto puede funcionar para un proyecto pequeño, hacer esto puede ralentizar tus búsquedas de manera significativa si tienes muchos archivos en tu proyecto. Recomiendo solo añadir a path los directorios de los archivos más visitados.

Actualizar path solo te llevará unos segundos y haciendo esto te ahorrarás un montón de tiempo.

Searching in Files with :grep

If you need to find in files, you can use grep. Vim has two ways of doing that:

• Internal grep (:vim. Yes, it is spelled :vim. It is short for :vimgrep).
• External grep (:grep).

Let's go through internal grep first. :vim has the following syntax:

:vim /pattern/ file

• /pattern/ is a regex pattern of your search term.
• file is the file(s) argument. Just like :find, you can pass it * and ** wildcards.

For example, to look for all occurrences of "foo" string inside all ruby files (.rb) inside app/controllers/ directory:

:vim /foo/ app/controllers/**/*.rb

After running that command, you will be redirected to the first result. Vim's vim search command uses quickfix operation. To see all search results, run :copen. This opens a quickfix window. Here are some useful quickfix commands to get you productive immediately:

:copen        Open the quickfix window
:cclose       Close the quickfix window
:cnext        Go to the next error
:cprevious    Go to the previous error
:colder       Go to the older error list
:cnewer       Go to the newer error list

I won't cover quickfix too deep here. To learn more about quickfix, check out :h quickfix.

You may notice that running internal grep (:vim) can get slow if you have a large number of matches. This is because it reads them into memory. Vim loads each matching files as if they are being edited.

Let's talk about external grep. By default, it uses grep terminal command. To search for "foo" inside a ruby file inside app/controllers/ directory, you can do this:

:grep "foo" app/controllers/**/*.rb

Just like :vim, :grep accepts * and ** wildcards. It also displays all matches using quickfix.

Vim uses grepprg variable to determine which external program to run when running :grep so you don't have to always use the terminal grep command. Later in this article, I will show you how to change default the external command.

Browsing Files with netrw

netrw is Vim's built-in file explorer. It is useful to see a project's structural hierarchy. To run netrw, you need these two settings in your .vimrc:

set nocp
filetype plugin on

I will only cover the basic use of netrw here, but it should be enough to get you started. You can start netrw when you launch Vim and passing it a directory instead of a file. For example:

vim .
vim src/client/
vim app/controllers/

To launch netrw from inside Vim, you can use :edit and pass it a directory instead of a filename:

:edit .
:edit src/client/
:edit app/controllers/

There are other ways to launch netrw window without passing a directory:

:Explore     Starts netrw on current file
:Sexplore    Not kidding. Starts netrw on split top half of the screen
:Vexplore    Starts netrw on split left half of the screen

You can navigate netrw with Vim motions (I will cover these on chapter 5). If you need to create, delete, and rename file/directory, here is a list of useful netrw commands:

%    Create a new file
d    Create a new directory
R    Rename a file or directory
D    Delete a file or directory

:h netrw is very comprehensive. Check it out if you have time.

If you find netrw too bland and need more flavor, vim-vinegar is a good plugin to improve netrw. If you're looking for a different file explorer, NERDTree is a good alternative. Check them out!

FZF

Now that you've learned how to open and search files in Vim with built-in tools, it's time to use plugins to level up your search game.

One thing that modern text editors got right that Vim didn't is how easy it is to find files and to find in files . In this second half of the chapter, I will show you how to use FZF.vim to make searching in Vim easy and powerful.

Setup

But first, make sure you have FZF and ripgrep download. Follow the instruction on their github repo. The commands fzf and rg should now be available after successful installs.

Ripgrep is a search tool much like grep (hence the name). It is generally faster than grep and has many useful features. FZF is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder. You can use it with any commands, including ripgrep. Together, they make a powerful search tool combination.

FZF does not use ripgrep by default, so we need to tell FZF to use ripgrep with FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND variable. In my .zshrc (.bashrc if you use bash), I have these:

if type rg &> /dev/null; then
  export FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND='rg --files'
  export FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS='-m'
fi

Pay attention to -m in FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS. This option allows us to make multiple selections with tab or shift-tab. You don't have to have this line to make FZF work with Vim, but I think it is a useful option to have. It will come in handy when you want to perform search and replace in multiple files which I'll cover in just a little bit. FZF accepts more options, to learn more, check out fzf's repo or man fzf. At minimum you should have export FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND='rg'.

After installing FZF and ripgrep, let's set up FZF plugin. I am using vim-plug plugin manager in this example, but you can use any plugin managers.

Add these inside your .vimrc plugins. You need to use FZF.vim plugin (created by the same FZF author).

Plug 'junegunn/fzf.vim'
Plug 'junegunn/fzf', { 'do': { -> fzf#install() } }

For more info about this plugin, you can check out FZF.vim repo.

FZF Syntax

To be able to use FZF efficiently, you should learn some basic FZF syntax. Fortunately, the list is short:

• ^ is a prefix exact match. To search for a phrase starting with "welcome": ^welcome.
• $ is a suffix exact match. To search for a phrase ending with "my friends": friends$.
• ' is an exact match. To search for the phrase "welcome my friends": 'welcome my friends.
• | is an "or" match. To search for either "friends" or "foes": friends | foes.
• ! is an inverse match. To search for phrase containing "welcome" and not "friends": welcome !friends

You can mix and match these options. For example, ^hello | ^welcome friends$ will search for the phrase starting with either "welcome" or "hello" and ending with "friends".

Finding Files

To search for files inside Vim using FZF.vim plugin, you can use the :Files method. Run :Files from Vim and you will be prompted with FZF search prompt.

Since you will be using this command frequently, it is good to have this mapped. I map mine with Ctrl-f. In my .vimrc, I have this:

nnoremap <silent> <C-f> :Files<CR>

Finding in Files

To search inside files, you can use the :Rg command.

Again, since you will probably use this frequently, let's map it. I map mine with <Leader>f.

nnoremap <silent> <Leader>f :Rg<CR>

Other Searches

FZF.vim provides many other search commands. I won't go through each one of them here, but you can check them out here.

Here's what my FZF mappings look like. Feel free to borrow from mine to create your own powerful set of mappings!

nnoremap <silent> <Leader>b :Buffers<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <C-f> :Files<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <Leader>f :Rg<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <Leader>/ :BLines<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <Leader>' :Marks<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <Leader>g :Commits<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <Leader>H :Helptags<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <Leader>hh :History<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <Leader>h: :History:<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <Leader>h/ :History/<CR> 

Replacing grep with rg

As I mentioned earlier, Vim has two ways to search in files: :vim and :grep. :grep uses external search tool that you can reassign using grepprg keyword. I will show you how to configure Vim to use ripgrep instead of terminal grep when running the :grep command.

Now let's setup grepprg so :grep uses ripgrep. Add this in your vimrc.

set grepprg=rg\ --vimgrep\ --smart-case\ --follow

Feel free to modify some of the options above! For more information what the options above mean, check out man rg.

After you update grepprg, now when you run :grep, it will actually run rg --vimgrep --smart-case --follow instead of running grep. If you want to search for "foo" using ripgrep, you can now run a more succinct command :grep "foo" instead of :grep "foo" . -R (in addition, ripgrep searches faster than grep).

Just like the old :grep, this new :grep still uses quickfix to display results.

You might wonder, "Well, this is nice but I never used :grep in Vim, plus can't I just use :Rg to find phrases in files? When will I ever need to use :grep?

That is a very good question. You may need to use :grep in Vim to do search and replace in multiple files, which I will cover next.

Search and Replace in Multiple Files

Modern text editors like VSCode make it very easy to search and replace a string across multiple files. In my early Vim days, when I had to search and replace a string in multiple files, I would use Atom because I couldn't do it easily in Vim. In this section, I will show you two different methods to easily do that in Vim.

The first method is to replace all matching phrases in your project. You will need to use :grep. If you want to replace all instances of "pizza" with "donut", here's what you do:

:grep "pizza"
:cfdo %s/pizza/donut/g | update

That's it? Yup! Let me break down the steps:

1. :grep pizza uses ripgrep to succinctly search for all instances of "pizza" (by the way, this would still work even if you didn't reassign grepprg to use ripgrep. You would have to do :grep "pizza" . -R instead of :grep "pizza"). I prefer ripgrep for this task because of its concise syntax.
2. :cfdo executes any command you pass to all files in your quickfix list. In this case, your command is the substitution command %s/pizza/donut/g. The pipe (|) is a chain operator. You need to run update to save each file after you substitute it. I will cover substitute command in depth in later chapter.

The second method is to search and replace in select files. With this method, you can manually choose which files you want to perform select and replace on. Here is what you do:

1. Clear your buffers first. It is imperative that your buffer list contains only the files you need. You can clear it with %bd | e# | bd# (or restart Vim).
2. Run :Files.
3. Select all files you want to perform search and replace on. To select multiple files, use tab / shift+tab. This is only possible if you have -m option in FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS (refer to earlier FZF setup section for the -m option).
4. Run :bufdo %s/pizza/donut/g | update. The command :bufdo %s/pizza/donut/g | update looks similar to the earlier :cfdo %s/pizza/donut/g | update command. That's because they are. The difference is instead of substituting all quickfix entries (:cfdo), you are substituting all buffer entries (:bufdo).

Learn Search the Smart Way

Searching is the bread-and-butter of text editing. Learning how to search well in Vim will help your text editing workflow.

FZF.vim is a game-changer. I can't imagine using Vim without it. I think it is very important to have a good search tool when starting Vim. I've seen people struggling to transition to Vim because it is missing critical features modern text editors have, like a powerful and easy search. I was one. I hope this chapter addresses one of the issues and help to make the transition to Vim easier. To improve your searching prowess even more, I suggest to check out fzf repo.

You also just saw Vim's extensibility in action - the ability to extend search functionality with a plugin and / or an external program. In the future, keep in mind of what other features you wish to extend in Vim. Chances are, someone has created a plugin or there is a program for it already.

Next, let's talk about a very important topic in Vim: grammar.