How to use Ctrl-P to interactively search file contents for all files in a project?

Question

I tried today to perform a search on every files of a project. I use Ctrl-P and search on lines like so :

But the result of the search is only on the previously opened file. Here I open only main.php.

Do you know a way to search on all files without having to open them one by one ?

Thanks,

Answer 1

:CtrlPLine is actually supposed to work on listed buffers.

If you absolutely want to use that feature on every file in your project, you could add them to the argument list (and thus the buffer list) with something like:

:argadd **/*.php

but that doesn't sound like a very good idea for performance reasons.

Using :vimgrep or :grep sounds a lot better to me:

:vim foo **/*.php
:cw

You lose the "fuzziness" of CtrlP, obviously, but you get reliability and flexibility in return.

Reference:

:help :argadd
:help :vimgrep
:help :grep
:help :cwindow
:help quickfix

Answer 2

You should use thoses plugins Sidesearch or fzf

Both allow to search in recursive directories using silversearch-ag

fzf allow to search on the listed files which include your string.