.. default-role:: code

Locate.vim

.. image:: doc/locate.png :align: center

/ and ? are search motions: simple and powerful. But when searching for a common pattern, especially in a large file, it can be hard to get to the one match you're looking for (tired of hitting n?). They also don't provide an overview of where the matches are: the only way to figure it out is to move the cursor.

Vim comes with alternate commands for this use-case (see :help vimgrep or :help ilist), but they all require manual work (refreshing the list of results, no highlighting, etc.). :Locate, or :L for short, handles all this and more.

Features

• Window specific highlighting!
• Automatic sizing, sorting and refreshing of results.
• Quick search for current selection / word under cursor.
• Customizable smartcase_ and very magic_ modes.

Quickstart

• :L foobar searches for "foobar" inside the current window (short for :Locate foobar). Matches in the current window will be highlighted.
• gl searches for the word under the cursor (normal mode) or the current selection (visual mode).
• :Lpurge closes the results list and cancels highlighting (can also be done via :lclose).

After each new search the cursor will jump to the location list and remember its position inside the searched window (this can be configured with the g:locate_focus and g:locate_jump_to options respectively). The list of results will stay updated on save. There are more commands and configuration options which you can read about by running :help Locate.

Installation

With pathogen.vim_:

.. code:: bash

$ cd ~/.vim/bundle $ git clone https://github.com/mtth/locate.vim

Otherwise simply copy the folders into your .vim directory.

.. _smartcase: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/options.html#'smartcase' .. _very magic: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pattern.html#/magic .. _pathogen.vim: https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen