How do I search the open buffers in Vim?

Question

I'd like to search for text in all files currently open in vim and display all results in a single place. There are two problems, I guess:

• I can't pass the list of open files to :grep/:vim, especially the names of files that aren't on the disk;
• The result of :grep -C 1 text doesn't look good in the quickfix window.

Here is a nice example of multiple file search in Sublime Text 2:

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Or

:bufdo vimgrepadd threading % | copen 

The quickfix window may not look good for you but it's a hell of a lot more functional than ST2's "results panel" if only because you can keep it open and visible while jumping to locations and interact with it if it's not there.

Answer 2

ack and Ack.vim handle this problem beautifully. You can also use :help :vimgrep. For example:

:bufdo AckAdd -n threading 

will create a nice quickfix window that lets you hop to the cursor position.