How do you open a file in vim from the terminal (osx)

Question

Say I'm doing a grep for something and in the results I have a bunch of files? How can I quickly open one of those files in vim without using the mouse and without or typing the name by hand?

For example, with my mouse I can CMD-Click the name of the file and it opens in vim. But I would like to have the same speed without using the mouse.

UPDATE: grep is just one example, I would like to know if there's a universal way to would work for any command. Something like a bash variable that holds the last file name or whatever. And also, it should open just the one file that I want.

Thanks.

Answer 1

When you use grep -l, file names won't be repeated, so you don't need sort | uniq or sort -u.

You can also use -p to open all files in tabs.

grep -rlH "mail" . | xargs vim -p

Answer 2

There's a bunch of ways to target a single file from a list of paths:

Pipe Them into Vim

To target a single file from a list of paths, you can pipe them all into Vim (using your grep example):

grep -rl "needle" . | vim -

You can then navigate to the single file name you're looking for with normal motions and open it with gf.

The slight downside of this approach is that you then have an unsaved buffer with the paths in it. To prevent Vim complaining about this when you try to quit, you can tell Vim this file doesn't need to be saved by setting 'nomodified' or by specifying a nofile 'buftype':

grep -rl "needle" . | vim - +'set nomod'

grep -rl "needle" . | vim - +'set buftype=nofile'

Use the quickfix

Vim allows you to pre-populate the quickfix with a list of files:

vim +copen -q <(grep -rn "needle" .)

You can then jump between the matches with :cn and :cp, or switch to the quickfix window, navigate to the file you want and open it with Enter.

The downside of this is that it will load the first file into a buffer along with any of the others that you visit via the quickfix.

:read ! the List Inside Vim

Another way you can get a shell command's output into Vim is with its :read ! command.

:r !grep -rl "needle" .

Like in the pipe solution, you can then open the file you're interested in with gf.

Select the File Outside Vim

There are any number of ways you could do this, but they're generally outside the scope of this site. One popular way is to install a fuzzy finder, such as fzf.

Answer 3

You can make grep print just the file names with grep -l -H. You could then pipe this to sort and uniq to get a list of files. This could then be passed to vim with xargs.

Lets say you wanted to open all files in the current directory or sub directories that contain the word mail, you would type something like this:

grep -r -l -H "mail" . | sort | uniq | xargs vim