How do I fix :grep leaving garbled output on my screen?

Question

I've been learning about :grep, and I'd like to suppress its output and view it in a quickfix window instead as many seem to suggest. However, it seems that whenever grep produces too much output, it fills the window, and I'm unable to make the unwanted output go away without manually <C-l>.

Things I've tried:

• silent grep! test -R . does not suppress grep output for some reason, output fills the screen

• execute 'silent grep! test -R .' | copen The quickfix window opens, and some parts of the screen remain with my original window contents; however, all the indentations are filled with grep output, and remain until <C-l>

• silent! execute 'silent grep! test -R .' | redraw | copen | redraw has the exact same behaviour as above

Running :set grepprg? yields grepprg=grep -n $* /dev/null. And :version yields VIM - Vi IMproved 9.0 Included patches: 1-2116.

Distro: NixOS

This seems to reproduce on vim -u NONE.

This only seems to occur when the grep output is more than one screenful; less than that, grep output is suppressed without issue.

I'm using kitty. On the other hand, I had set my TERM to xterm-256color, I guess for some compatibility reasons? Perhaps that may be related.

Answer 1

The problem mentioned in my gist:

The results are printed in the shell and clog our terminal's scroll buffer.

is different from the one you describe:

such a prompt appears, but even after dismissing the prompt with ENTER, the rest of my screen is cluttered with the garbled output of grep.

The former is not a "problem" per se. It is just how Vim has been working for decades: grep's output is printed in Vim's parent shell and you must press <CR> to come back cleanly to Vim. I never found that mechanism as refined as I wanted it to be, hence the "solution", but it is not unusable at all.

The latter is a real problem. The tricks in my gist should solve it but not directly. Something (or a combination of things) in your setup is behaving weirdly and bypassing both the terminal emulator and the shell effectively hides it, but the problem is still there and, IMO, needs fixing.

I would start by checking if the bad behavior also happens in other terminal emulator/shell/$TERM combinations.

FWIW, the proper $TERM for Kitty is xterm-kitty, not xterm-256color. I would set that correctly before even trying different combos.