Search multiple buffers without replacing

Question

Opening all 49 files in my working folder in separate buffers, I wanted to see if there were any em dashes.

I typed :bufdo /— and vim immediately went to work, processing a page of buffers at a time. All but one file appeared to not contain my string. The thing is, I wasn’t able to check. Everything just wizzed by and I just happened to see that there was one file that wasn’t marked as “Pattern not found”. What I was expecting was for it to stop at the first occurrence and then let me use n and N to scroll through the search findings.

My question is, is there a way to search through multiple buffers (without replacing) in a way that behaves similarly to searching in a single buffer?

Answer 1

1. bufdo runs a command (here, the ex command :/), so there's no real interactivity
2. For a search over multiple files (or buffers), use :grep/:vimgrep. For example:

:grep -R pat .
" or
:vimgrep /pat/ **/*
" or whatever you need

Then you navigate with the quickfix list (:help quickfix). Probably :cnext/:cprevious are useful, or :cwindow if you want to browse the list of matches.