Vim essentials: Ack

Ack is a tool for searching your (code)files, much like grep already does, but better. Ack is written in Perl and works on all major platforms, including Windows. To use Ack with Vim there’s this nice plugin called ack.vim. Install it together with App::Ack and you’re set to go.

With a single command (:Ack [options] {pattern} [{directory}]) you can recursively search for files matching {pattern}. The results returned from Ack will be visible in a newly opened pane in which you can navigate and open the file to start working with it. Every result line contains the file path, position of the matched search and the contents of that line.

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