After switching to Vim from Sublime (via a brief stint on Atom) there’s one feature that I used infrequently, but was incredibly invaluable when needed and that Recursive find & replace.

I wish there was a simple shift+cmd+f to bring it up, but here’s how to achieve something similar in Vim.

Populate Vim args:

:args `find <dir_to_look_in> -type f`

Find & replace:

:argdo %s/<replace_this>/<with_this>/gce | update
  • g - Change all occurrences on each line
  • c - Confirm before replacing
  • e - Skips pattern not found errors
  • | update - Saves buffer after applying change

Alternatively, you could just use vim-easygrep…