> Grepping for something seems to be trivial with :vimgrep and :grep but
> there's nothing simple like this for 'search&replace' and i wonder
> why... Is it done intentionally or i'm just missing something?
Just missing the power of the argdo/windo/bufdo commands:
bash> vim *.txt
:set hidden
:argdo :%s/foo/bar/g
(look over the changes and)
:wall
(if you things went successfully, or)
:qa!
(if things were borked)
will change all "foo" to "bar" in whatever filespec you give
(*.txt in this case).
For the argdo/bufdo commands, you either want to ":set hidden" or
change your command to
:argdo :%s/foo/bar/g | w
if you're confident in your changes, and want to write them
immediately after you make them.
You can issue pretty much any Ex command after the
argdo/bufdo/windo so you can even use conditional "if" logic if
you want to only perform the changes on a particular set of files.
Play around and before long, you'll wonder how you got along
without that family of commands (IIRC, with Vim7, a "tabdo"
command was also added).
HTH,
-tim
