We often search our projects for specific text within Vim like so:

:grep sometext

However, we have a need for speed. How can we grep faster?

grep is a built-in command of Vim. By default, it will use our system’s grep command. We can overwrite it to use The Silver Searcher’s ag command instead by putting this in our ~/.vimrc :

" The Silver Searcher if executable('ag') " Use ag over grep set grepprg=ag\ --nogroup\ --nocolor " Use ag in CtrlP for listing files. Lightning fast and respects .gitignore let g:ctrlp_user_command = 'ag %s -l --nocolor -g ""' " ag is fast enough that CtrlP doesn't need to cache let g:ctrlp_use_caching = 0 endif

This searches for the text under the cursor and shows the results in a “quickfix” window:

" bind K to grep word under cursor nnoremap K :grep! "\b<C-R><C-W>\b"<CR>:cw<CR>

It looks like this when we hit K with our cursor over SubscriptionMailer in the Upcase repo:

Cursor over each search result, hit Enter , and the file will be opened.

This defines a new command Ag to search for the provided text and open a “quickfix” window:

" bind \ (backward slash) to grep shortcut command -nargs=+ -complete=file -bar Ag silent! grep! <args>|cwindow|redraw!

We can map it to any character, such as \ :

nnoremap \ :Ag<SPACE>

When \ is pressed, Vim waits for our input:

:Ag

Standard ag arguments may be passed in at this point:

:Ag -i Stripe app/models

Hitting Enter results in:

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