Vim and ^M Dos characters Post on Dec 04, 2009

I've been working on a Flex project recently, one that I used to compile in Windows, but have since moved over to Linux with the Flex SDK. One of the problems I run into is that Dos appears to leave these characters in my files at the end of each line

// a comment in my flex file^M

The solution

It's painful to have to delete them all manually, so a simple command in vim will do it:

:1,$ s/^M//

To get the ^M you can hit 'Ctrl+v' and then 'Enter'

Aaron

'Find in files' in vim Post on Jun 14, 2009

I have been enjoying vim quite a bit recently, it is really starting to speed up my workflow. The learning curve is constant, however. The latest thing I have needed to know (and use quite a bit) is a 'find in files' feature. Vim has this built in with a plugin called 'vimgrep'. The documentation was pretty straight forward (:h vimgrep) but it wasn't immediately obvious how to do recursive searching. The solution was what vim calls 'starstar-wildcard' (essentially **)

This simple example produces a recursive search:

:vimgrep /myPattern/ **

The above example will search through everything though, including binary files (like pngs and such), so a little more instruction is needed.

:vimgrep /myPattern/ **/*.html

# this is also equivalent
:vim /myPattern/ **/*.html

Vim then gives you the first of the matches, you can cycle between them with :cnext/:cn and :cp/:cprevious.

If you have a lot of files to search through, :grep is faster.

:grep -Ir /myPattern/ *

Not so hard after all, af