Vim searching through all existing buffers

Question

When dealing with a single file, I'm used to:

/blah do some work n do some work n do some work 

Suppose now I want to search for some pattern over all buffers loaded in Vim, do some work on them, and move on. What commands do I use for this work flow?

Answer 1

Use the bufdo command.

:bufdo command 

:bufdo command is roughly equivalent to iterating over each buffer and executing command. For example, let's say you want to do a find and replace throughout all buffers:

:bufdo! %s/FIND/REPLACE/g 

Or let's say we want to delete all lines of text that match the regex "SQL" from all buffers:

:bufdo! g/SQL/del 

Or maybe we want to set the file encoding to UTF-8 on all the buffers:

:bufdo! set fenc=utf-8 

The above can be extrapolated for Windows (:windo), Tabs (:tabdo), and arguments (:argdo). See help on :bufdo for more information.

Answer 2

We can do this using vimgrep and searching across the argslist. But first let's populate our argslist with all our buffers:

:bufdo :args ## % 

Now we can search in our argslist

:vimgrep /blah/ ## 

Where % == the current filepath and ## == the arglist.

I recommend watching these vimcasts if you want to learn more: Populate the arglist, Search multiple files with vimgrep