Project Wide replace using Ag

Question

Referencing Post:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22206332/vim-ag-search-and-replace-globally-and-within-a-directory

Specifically:

:Ag foo
:Qfdo s/foo/bar/c

I type Ag miwt-os, I get this:

Which is the terminal, and I am lost her, how do I now get the results into the quckfix to run it through Qfdo?

Answer 1

You don't need a plugin for using The Silver Searcher — or any other grep alternative — in Vim:

set grepprg=ag\ --nogroup\ --nocolor\ --ignore-case\ --column\ --vimgrep
set grepformat=%f:%l:%c:%m,%f:%l:%m

With those lines in your vimrc you can simply do :grep miwt-os to populate the quickfix list with matching lines or :lgrep miwt-os to populate the location list.

From there you can open the quickfix/location window with either :cw or :lw to take a look at the list before going further or directly use :Qfdo.

If you want the quickfix/location window to be opened automatically, add these lines to your vimrc:

augroup quickfix
    autocmd!
    autocmd QuickFixCmdPost [^l]* cwindow
    autocmd QuickFixCmdPost l*    lwindow
augroup END

Answer 2

It looks like you have to :AgAdd instead of just Ag, which will add the results to quick links.

Answer 3

Use macros to do what you want. Start at the first replacement, :cr, then... (Comments just for description.)

qbq " clear b register
qa " start recording macro a
:s/old text/new text/
:cn
q " end macro
qb@a@bq " create macro b to call macro a then itself
@b " launch macro b

Watch it tear through your project.

Answer 4

But why you want to do this via Vim? It would be much easier to run ag -l pattern | xargs -n1 sed 's/pattern/replacement/g in Your shell (or at least via :!).