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The original was posted on /r/neovim by /u/lukas-reineke on 2024-04-10 05:08:06.

There was a discussion about search and replace in Neovim yesterday, and some people seemed to not know about :help grep. I’ll use that as an excuse to write about it.

First of all, :grep will search for a regex pattern in the files specified, and populate the quickfix list with the result. From there, you can do a lot of things, one of which is search and replace. The quickfix list is extremely powerful. To get familiar with it, I recommend reading :help quickfix.txt.

Now, grep is not very fast. We can do a lot better today by using ripgrep. And it is super easy to use it from within Neovim by changing :help 'grepprg' and :help 'grepformat'.

vim.opt.grepprg = "rg --vimgrep"
vim.opt.grepformat = "%f:%l:%c:%m"

With this in your init.lua, :grep will use ripgrep instead. ripgrep works slightly different from normal grep in that it does not take a second file parameter, but instead just searches in the current directory. So to use it, all you have to do is run :grep foo.

Some other tips.

1. To get rid of the annoying message output, run it with :help :silent, :sil grep foo
2. ripgrep has a lot of useful options. I personally use --hidden to include hidden files, and --smart-case, which works the same as :help 'smartcase'