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I'm switching from a Windows PHP-specific editor to VIM, on the philosophy of "use one editor for everything and learn it really well."
However, one feature I liked in my PHP editor was its "find and replace" capability. I could approach things two ways:
Just find. Search all files in a project for a string, see all the occurrences listed, and click to dive into that file at that line.
Blindly replace all occurrences of "foo" with "bar".
And of course I could use the GUI to say what types of files, whether to look in subfolders, whether it was case sensitive, etc.
I'm trying to approximate this ability now, and trying to piece it together with bash is pretty tedious. Doable, but tedious.
Does anybody know any great tools for things like this, for Linux and/or Windows? (I would really prefer a GUI if possible.) Or failing that, a bash script that does the job well? (If it would list file names and line numbers and show code snippets, that would be great.)
Try sed. For example:
sed -i -e 's/foo/bar/g' myfile.txt
Vim has multi-file search built in using the command :vimgrep (or :grep to use an external grep program - this is the only option prior to Vim 7).
:vimgrep will search through files for a regex and load a list of matches into a buffer - you can then either navigate the list of results visually in the buffer or with the :cnext and :cprev commands. It also supports searching through directory trees with the ** wildcard. e.g.
:vimgrep "^Foo.*Bar" **/*.txt
to search for lines starting with Foo and containing Bar in any .txt file under the current directory.
:vimgrep uses the 'quickfix' buffer to store its results. There is also :lvimgrep which uses a local buffer that is specific to the window you are using.
Vim does not support multi-file replace out of the box, but there are plugins that will do that too on vim.org.
I don't get why you can't do this with VIM.
Just Find
/Foo
Highlights all instances of Foo in the file and you can do what you want.
Blindly Replace
:% s/Foo/Bar/g
Obviously this is just the tip of the iceberg. You have lots of flexibility of the scope of your search and full regex support for your term. It might not work exactly like your former editor, but I think your original 'use one editor' idea is a valid one.
Notepad++ allows me to search and replace in an entire folder (and subfolders), with regex support.
You can use perl in command prompt to replace text in files.
perl -p -i".backup" -e "s/foo/bar/g" test.txt
Since you are looking for a GUI tool, I generally use the following 2 tools. Both of them have great functionality including wildcat matching, regex, filetype filter etc. Both of them displays good useful information about the hit in files like filename/lines.
Visual Studio: fast yet powerful. I uses it if the file number is huge (say, tens of thousands...)
pspad: lightweight. And a good feature about find/replace for pspad is that it will organize hits in different files in a tree hierarchy, which is very clear.
There are a number of tools that you can use to make things easier. Firstly, to search all the files in the project from vim you can use :grep like so:
:grep 'Function1' myproject/
This essentially runs a grep and lets you quickly jump from/to locations where it has been found.
Ctags is a tool that finds declarations in your code and then allows vim to jump to these declarations. To do this, run ctags and then place your cursor over a function call and then use Ctrl-]. Here is a link with some more ctags information:
http://www.davedevelopment.co.uk/2006/03/13/vim-ctags-and-php-5/
I don't know if it is an option for you, but if you load all your files into vim with
vim *.php
than you can
:set hidden
:argdo %s/foo/bar/g => will execute the substitue command in all opened buffers
:wall => will write all opened buffers
Or instead of loading all your files into vim try :help vimgrep and a cominbation of :help argdo and :help argadd
For Windows, I think that grepWin is hard to beat -- a GUI to a powerful and flexible grep tool for Windows. It searches, and replaces, knows about regular expressions, that sort of stuff.
look into sed ... powerful command line tool that should accomplish most of what you're looking for ... its supports regex, so your find/replace is quite easy.
(man sed)
Notepad++ has support for syntax highlighting in many languages and supports find and replace across all open files with regex and basic \n \r \t support.
The command grep -rn "search terms" * will search for the specified terms in all files (including those in sub-directories) and will return matching lines including file name and line number. Armed with this info, it is easy to jump to a particular file/line in VIM.
As was mentioned before, sed is extremely powerful for doing find-and-replace.
You can run both of these tools from inside VIM as well.
Some developers I currently work with swear by Textpad. It has a UI and also supports using regex's -- everything you're looking for and more.
A very useful search tool is ack. (Ubuntu refers to it as "ack-grep" in the repositories and man pages.)
The short version of what it does is a combination of find and grep that's more powerful and intelligent than that pair.
Related
I am comfortable with vim for normal editing.
I still need to use BBEdit for a few things. Mainly multi-file search. I provide it a folder listing of XCode project and what I want to search for and it produces a listing of files that I can do down through and do whatever.
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.21/21.02/BBEditDoesntSuck/figure3.jpg
Can I somehow do this in vim? I am using the new maximum-awesome version released by Square: https://github.com/square/maximum-awesome
Given that maximum-awesome includes the ack plugin and the silver searcher package, :Ack string is the easiest way to do this. It also includes unimpaired plugin, so you can navigate the results (in clist) using [q and ]q. :help unimpaired, :help ack.
Don't use that silly distribution, it may feel like a convenient shortcut at first but it will slow you down. Configuring Vim and installing plugins yourself according to your needs is a large part of the learning experience. Skip that part and you'll be hooked to plugins and to someone else's tastes without getting the chance to actually learn to use Vim.
Case in point:
Vim does exactly what you want without plugins.
:vim foo **/*.m | cw
searches for foo in every *.m file under the working directory and opens the quickfix window if matches are found.
See :help file-searching and :h :vim grep.
You have installed a distribution that comes with 35 plugins without even reviewing them and deciding if they are worth installing or not or even actually read up on what they do. One of those plugins, Ack.vim, is there specifically to provide a streamlined (and fast) project-wide search experience. You should read its documentation, :help ack.
And, maybe, try the standard method before you get too used to Ack.vim.
You can use vimg for multi file search.
vimg /search string/ **
** makes it recursive for all file types
**/**.java if you want to search recursively for all java files
* if you want to search current working directory only
copen to open search results
cnext to see next match
cprev to see prev match
cclose to close search results
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I heard it takes 30 days minimum to get comfortable with vi. I'm on day 2 hehe. Right now, I seem to be merely memorizing different shortcuts for things I already did in Visual Studio (incremental search, prev/next word, etc.).
So far the most powerful aspect seems to be the numeric keys combined with commands (5 * next line), and the idea of normal/insert modes.
There are a few things I miss from Visual Studio. Ctrl-Click'ing the mouse for quick copy and pasting is probably the biggest.
So that I don't get discouraged, can you guys walk me through some things in vi that you do regularly that can't be done in Visual Studio? It'll help me focus on what to learn and help me develop better habits.
I'll just leave a link to this SO answer here.
VI means never ever having to take you fingers off the keyboard.
Note that I don't use Visual Studio, and know little about the available features in it. The following are examples of what I find useful in Vim, not a list of missing features in Visual Studio.
Macros
It's easy to create macros for complex (but repetitive) operations. To illustrate with a simple example, let's say we start with:
Line1
Line2
Line3
Line4
Line5
Now we want to envelop each line in a print(""); statement.
Place the cursor on the first line, and enter:
qx to start recording a macro to the register x
Shift+I print(" Esc to insert text at the beginning of the line
Shift+A "); Esc to append text at the end of the line
j to go down one line
q to stop recording the macro
4#x to execute the macro in register x 4 times
See :help complex-repeat for more info on Vim macros.
Text objects
Note that this is one of the improvements Vim has over the traditional Vi. If it doesn't work, you're probably running in Vi compatibility mode; use :set nocompatible to enable the full functionality of Vim.
Text objects allow you to easily select regions of text. Let's say we start with the following text, and place the cursor on some text:
<b><i>some text</i></b>
Now we want to delete everything between <i> and </i>. This can be done by simply typing the command dit (d'elete i'nner t'ag)! Or if we want to include the tags themselves in our selection, use dat (d'elete a t'ag). To delete everything inside the <b> tags, use d2it (d'elete two i'nner t'ags).
You can similarly use daw (delete a word), dap (delete a paragraph), di" (delete inside double-quotes), etc; see :help text-objects for the complete list.
Another useful example of text objects:
v2ap"+y
v toggles visual mode. This makes it easier to see what you're selecting, and lets you adjust your selection with a series of multiple motions before you execute a command.
2ap selects this paragraph and the next one
"+ selects the system clipboard as register for the next operation
y yanks the selection to the given register
In other words, that command would copy two paragraphs from your text to the system clipboard (e.g. for pasting them here at StackOverflow).
Global editing
The global command is used to apply an Ex command to all lines matching a given regular expression. Examples:
:global/test/print or :g/test/p would print all lines containing the phrase test
:global/test/delete or :g/test/d would delete said lines
:global/test/substitute/^/#/ or :g/test/s/^/#/ would search for lines containing the phrase test, and comment them out by substituting the regexp anchor ^ (beginning-of-line) with the symbol #.
You can also do some cool stuff by passing the search motions /pattern or ?pattern as ranges:
:?test?move . searches backwards for a line containing test, and moves it to your current position in the file
:/test/copy . searches forwards for a line containing test, and copies it to the current position in the file
Good luck and have fun learning Vim!
Edit a file on a Solaris machine that only allows SSH access.
This article is what got me started on Vim, and I never looked back:
http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html
It has some great examples on Vim's power.
Use screen to keep a session running on a remote machine accessed over ssh
Visual Studio's regular expressions are a little bit Mickey Mouse. Vim has the full POSIX regular expression language at your fingertips.
As far as I can tell (in Visual C# express 2010) ctrl-click just selects whatever word you click on. To do the same in VIM, you can combine the yank command with a movement command.
So you press "y" for yank (copy) then "e" or "w" to copy to the end of the word.
There is many differences.
Block (and column) wise copy, paste, edit
the dot command! (after duck tape the second most powerful tool on the planet, seriously)
I suggest you watch some screencasts at http://vimcasts.org/ to get a feeling of the power of vim.
e.g.:
http://vimcasts.org/episodes/creating-the-vimcasts-logo-as-ascii-art/
http://vimcasts.org/episodes/selecting-columns-with-visual-block-mode/
You could always use the Vim emulator/add-on for Visual Studio and get some of the power of vim mixed with the features of VS. If you're already using Visual Studio, I assume you're using a .NET language, which without VS, would be much more painful to use.
Vim Essentials is a nice set of slides.
Personally, I got used to vi a long time ago, when we didn't have the luxury of a mouse in student's Unix terminals. Since then, I used vi/vim for everything safe for writing emails.
To this day, I probably use only 1/20 of the commands, but never felt the need to write code with another text editor, and reaching for a mouse in an IDE feels very clumsy to me.
Using high level and expressive languages, that do not require an IDE (mainly python, sql, javascript) really helps. I suppose it wouldn't be as easy with Java or C++.
Not having to move and point with the mouse when coding (safe for using the browser) also helps preventing Carpal tunnel syndrome.
BTW, I suppose Vim integrates better with Unix than with Windows... and who said 30 minutes was a little optimistic :)
Edit documents over SSH. Vim's really nice for that.
Edit: looks like a lot of people have already said that :)
teco is your answer. You only need a PDP-10 and an ASR-33 and you're on your way!
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First of all, great praise goes out to PowerGREP. It's a great program.
But it's not free. Some of its options I'm looking for:
Being able to use .NET regexp's (or similar) to find things in a filtered list of files through subdirectories.
Replacing that stuff with other regexps.
Being able to jump to that part of the file in some sort of editor.
Non commandline.
Being able to copy the results / filename and occurrences of the text.
Low overhead would also be nice, so not too many dependencies, etc.
And I need it on Windows.
I would suggest trying the new dnGrep. It's a .NET application that provides grep-like functionality and has almost all the features you specified.
Here are the features and a sample screenshot:
Shell integration (ability to search from Windows Explorer)
Plain text/regex/XPath search (including case-insensitive search)
Phonetic search (using Bitap and Needleman-Wunch algorithms)
File move/copy/delete actions
Search inside archives (via plug-ins)
Search Microsoft Word documents (via plug-ins)
Search PDF documents (via plug-ins)
Undo functionality
Optional integration with a text editor (like Notepad++)
Bookmarks (ability to save regex searches for the future)
Pattern test form
Search result highlighting
Search result preview
Does not require installation (can be run from a USB drive)
Feature-wise nothing even comes close to PowerGREP, so the question is, how many compromises are you willing to make? I agree that PowerGREP's price tag is a bit steep (not that I have ever regretted a single penny I spent on it), so perhaps something cheaper might do?
UltraEdit is an excellent text editor with very good regex support. It supports Perl-style regular expressions, and you can do find/replace operations in multiple (optionally pre-filtered) files with it. I'd say it can do everything you want to do according to your question.
RegexBuddy, apart from being the best regex editor/debugger on the market, also has a limited GREP functionality, allowing search/replace in (pre-filtered) subdirectories. It's also not free, but considerably less expensive than PowerGREP, and its regex engine has all the features you could ask for (the current version even introduced recursive regexes, and the extremely useful ability to translate regexes between flavors). Big pluses here are the ability to do a non-desctructive preview for all operations, and to have backups automatically be created of all files that are modified during a grep.
I use GrepWin extensively during development and on production servers - it doesn't support all the features you specify, but it gets the job done (your mileage may vary).
For a fast loading, fast executing program used to only find (no search and replace) then I've found Baregrep to be pretty good. It does subdirectories.
You might have a look on this:
Open Source PowerGREP Alternatives
Currently there're six alternatives to PowerGREP.
Get Cygwin for a bunch of free alternatives!
grep, sed, awk, perl, python... goes on.
But, oops! you want to stick to GUI.
I always wonder at how people wrap GUI around things like grep and get cash for that!
WinGrep seems to be free though and, yet comes with quite a punch.
Windows Grep is designed for searching plain-ASCII text files, such as program source, HTML, RTF and batch files, but it can also search binary files such as word processor documents, databases, spreadsheets and executables.
I do not know PowerGREP, but grepWin lets you search regexes in directories.
You can get GNU grep or Gawk.
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I've got bunches of auxiliary files that are generated by code and LaTeX documents that I dearly wish would not be suggested by SpotLight as potential search candidates. I'm not looking for example.log, I'm looking for example.tex!
So can Spotlight be configured to ignore, say, all .log files?
(I know, I know; I should just use QuickSilver instead…)
#diciu That's an interesting answer. The problem in my case is this:
Figure out which importer handles your type of file
I'm not sure if my type of file is handled by any single importer? Since they've all got weird extensions (.aux, .glo, .out, whatever) I think it's improbable that there's an importer that's trying to index them. But because they're plain text they're being picked up as generic files. (Admittedly, I don't know much about Spotlight's indexing, so I might be completely wrong on this.)
#diciu again: TextImporterDontImportList sounds very promising; I'll head off and see if anything comes of it.
Like you say, it does seem like the whole UTI system doesn't really allow not searching for something.
#Raynet Making the files invisible is a good idea actually, albeit relatively tedious for me to set up in the general sense. If worst comes to worst, I might give that a shot (but probably after exhausting other options such as QuickSilver). (Oh, and SetFile requires the Developer Tools, but I'm guessing everyone here has them installed anyway :) )
#Will - these things that define types are called uniform type identifiers.
The problem is they are a combination of extensions (like .txt) and generic types (i.e. public.plain-text matches a txt file without the txt extension based purely on content) so it's not as simple as looking for an extension.
RichText.mdimporter is probably the importer that imports your text file.
This should be easily verified by running mdimport in debug mode on one of the files you don't want indexed:
cristi:~ diciu$ echo "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" > ~/input.txt
cristi:~ diciu$ mdimport -d 4 -n ~/input.txt 2>&1 | grep Imported
kMD2008-09-03 12:05:06.342 mdimport[1230:10b] Imported '/Users/diciu/input.txt' of type 'public.plain-text' with plugIn /System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter.
The type that matches in my example is public.plain-text.
I've no idea how you actually write an extension-based exception for an UTI (like public.plain-text except anything ending in .log).
Later edit: I've also looked though the RichText mdimporter binary and found a promising string but I can't figure out if it's actually being used (as a preference name or whatever):
cristi:FoodBrowser diciu$ strings /System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/RichText |grep Text
TextImporterDontImportList
Not sure how to do it on a file type level, but you can do it on a folder level:
Source: http://lists.apple.com/archives/spotlight-dev/2008/Jul/msg00007.html
Make spotlight ignore a folder
If you absolutely can't rename the folder because other software depends on it another technique is to go ahead and rename the directory to end in ".noindex", but then create a symlink in the same location pointing to the real location using the original name.
Most software is happy to use the symlink with the original name, but Spotlight ignores symlinks and will note the "real" name ends in *.noindex and will ignore that location.
Perhaps something like:
mv OriginalName OriginalName.noindex
ln -s OriginalName.noindex
OriginalName
ls -l
lrwxr-xr-x 1 andy admin 24 Jan 9 2008
OriginalName -> OriginalName.noindex
drwxr-xr-x 11 andy admin 374 Jul 11
07:03 Original.noindex
Here's how it might work.
Note: this is not a very good solution as a system update will overwrite changes you will perform.
Get a list of all importers
cristi:~ diciu$ mdimport -L
2008-09-03 10:42:27.144 mdimport[727:10b] Paths: id(501) (
"/System/Library/Spotlight/Audio.mdimporter",
"/System/Library/Spotlight/Chat.mdimporter",
"/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/SourceCode.mdimporter",
Figure out which importer handles your type of file (example for the Audio importer):
cristi:~ diciu$ cat /System/Library/Spotlight/Audio.mdimporter/Contents/Info.plist
[..]
CFBundleTypeRole
MDImporter
LSItemContentTypes
public.mp3
public.aifc-audio
public.aiff-audio
Alter the importer's plist to delete the type you want to ignore.
Reimport the importer's types so the system picks up the change:
mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/Chat.mdimporter
The only option probably is to have them not indexed by spotlight as from some reason you cannot do negative searches. You can search for files with specifix file extension, but you cannot not search for ones that don't match.
You could try making those files invisible for Finder, Spotlight won't index invisible files. Command for setting the kIsInvisible flag on files is:
SetFile -a v [filename(s)]
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The default shell in Mac OS X is bash, which I'm generally happy to be using. I just take it for granted. It would be really nice if it auto-completed more stuff, though, and I've heard good things about zsh in this regard. But I don't really have the inclination to spend hours fiddling with settings to improve my command line usage by a tiny amount, since my life on the command line isn't that bad.
(As I understand it, bash can also be configured to auto-complete more cleverly. It's the configuring I'm not all that keen on.)
Will switching to zsh, even in a small number cases, make my life easier? Or is it only a better shell if you put in the time to learn why it's better? (Examples would be nice, too :) )
#Rodney Amato
&
#Vulcan Eager
give two good reasons to respectively stick to bash and switch to zsh. Looks like I'll have to investigate both! Oh well :)
Is there anyone with an opinion from both sides of the argument?
Personally, I love zsh.
Generally, you probably won't notice the difference between it and bash, until you want to quickly do things like recursive globbing:
**/*.c for example.
Or use suffix aliases to associate specific progs with different suffixes, so that you can "execute" them directly. The below alias lets you "run" a C source file at the prompt by simply typing ./my_program.c – which will work exactly as if you typed vim ./my_program.c. (Sort of the equivalent to double clicking on the icon of a file.)
alias -s c=vim
Or print the names of files modified today:
print *(e:age today now:)
You can probably do all of these things in bash, but my experience with zsh is that if there's something I want to do, I can probably find it in zsh-lovers.
I also find the book 'From Bash to Z-Shell' really useful.
Playing with the mind bogglingly large number of options is good fun too!
For casual use you are probably better off sticking with bash and just installing bash completion.
Installing it is pretty easy, grab the bash-completion-20060301.tar.gz from http://www.caliban.org/bash/index.shtml#completion and extract it with
tar -xzvf bash-completion-20060301.tar.gz
then copy the bash_completion/bash_completion file to /etc with
sudo cp bash_completion/bash_completion /etc
which will prompt you for your password. You probably will want to make a /etc/bash_completion.d directory for any additional completion scripts (for instance I have the git completion script in there).
Once this is done the last step is to make sure the .bash_profile file in your home directory has
if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
. /etc/bash_completion
fi
in it to load the completion file when you login.
To test it just open a new terminal, and try completing on cvs and it should show you the cvs options in the list of completions.
Switch to zsh. You will have access to:
zmv: You can do: zmv '(*).mp3' '$1.wma' for thousands of files.
zcalc: Extremely comfortable calculator, better than bc.
zparseopts: One-liner for parsing arbitrary complex options given to your script.
autopushd: You can always do popd after cd to change back to your previous directory.
Floating point support. It is needed from time to time.
Hashes support. Sometimes they are just a key feature.
If all you want to use ZSH for is better completion, the configuration is pretty easy. Place this in your ~/.zshrc:
autoload -U zutil # [1]
autoload -U compinit # [2]
autoload -U complist # [3]
compinit
However, it's worth checking out all the other great features of the ZSH. The above example will give you a pretty plain prompt with good completion. If you don't want to fiddle with configurations, but want to see what ZSH can do for you, Google for "zshrc" and you will get some ready to use configurations to get started.
[1]: http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Zsh-Modules.html#The-zsh_002fzutil-Module
[2]: http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Completion-System.html#Initialization
[3]: http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Zsh-Modules.html#The-zsh_002fcomplist-Module
zsh has a console gui configuration thing. You can set it up pretty quickly and easily without having to fiddle with configuration files. I don't think you will need much time to set it up, probably 10 seconds with just using defaults, so go ahead and try it out.
Staale is talking about a wizard like program (CUI) which autoruns the first time you run zsh. Just answer some questions, view/change the defaults and its configured for you.
IBM developerWorks has great resources on zsh.
I have not used very advanced features and so far I have not come across serious differences which should hamper someone coming from bash.
Some examples:
!?pattern<Tab> will autocomplete to
the last command in history matching
pattern. Very useful.
You can configure a prompt on the
RHS. One use is to keep a fixed
width prompt on the left hand side
so all commands line up nicely while
displaying the pwd (or anything of
variable width) as the right hand
side prompt.
You can redirect input from multiple files (yet to try this): cat < file1 < file2 < file3