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Neovim Multiline Search and Replace with grug-far.nvim | ast-grep and waaaaaay more

Have you ever needed to replace really complex strings in Neovim? Probably sometimes you need to replace entire paragraphs that include multiple lines

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By Christian Arzu
4 min read
Neovim Multiline Search and Replace with grug-far.nvim | ast-grep and waaaaaay more

Contents

Table of contents

YouTube video

Pre-requisites

  • If you don’t want to watch the video above, and you already have your own neovim config, and want to quickly get started and follow along in this tutorial
  • Run the git clone commands below to clone my dotfiles in your .config directory and we will run my config below
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mkdir -p ~/.config
git clone git@github.com:linkarzu/dotfiles-latest ~/.config/linkarzu/dotfiles-latest
  • Open the newly downloaded neobean config with:
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NVIM_APPNAME=linkarzu/dotfiles-latest/neovim/neobean nvim
  • You can create an alias in your .bashrc or .zshrc file to run my config
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alias neobean='NVIM_APPNAME=linkarzu/dotfiles-latest/neovim/neobean nvim'
  • Then to run this config, just run neobean
  • If you don’t even have neovim yet, of course you will need to install it first, so if you’re just getting started, I have a video for you:

If you like my content, and want to support me

  • I create and edit my videos in an M1 mac mini, and it’s starting to stay behind in the editing side of things, tends to slow me down a bit, I’d like to upgrade the machine I use for all my videos to a mac mini with these specs:
    • Apple M4 Pro chip with 14‑core CPU, 20‑core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
    • 24GB unified memory
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  • If you want to help me reach my goal, you can donate here

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Follow me on social media

  • The following links will be in the YouTube video description:
    • Each one of the videos shown
    • A link to this blogpost

How do you manage your passwords?

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Multiline search and replace

  • I used to do this by hand, fuck that man
  • I needed to add {:target="\_blank"} at the end of each of my links
  • Demo in video
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\[(.*?)\]\((http[s]?:\/\/.*?)\)(?:[^{]|$)
[$1]($2){:target="_blank"}

Add a line at the end of every file

RIPGREP
(\n|.)*
return match .. "\n<!-- very end of the file -->"
--multiline
\x (lua interpreter)

Replace only certain items

  • Sometimes your search includes multiple results, but you need to leave some of them out
  • that’s when you use \s ( Sync all )
    • Sync All does not work with multiline replacement
    • ast-grep only supports \r ( Replace )

Replace only certain files in a sub path

  • Use this in the Files Filter: filter
  • The Paths: filter only accepts fixed paths
  • The Files Filter uses gitignore syntax
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_posts/**/*
or
_posts/*.md

Search only current file

  • Look at the cookbook
  • You can (and should) create a keymap for the ones you need
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:lua require('grug-far').open({ prefills = { paths = vim.fn.expand("%") } })

ast-grep

  • ast-grep understand your codes, that’s all I fucking now
  • Their page
  • “It is like syntax-aware grep/sed! You can write code patterns to locate and modify code, based on AST, in thousands of files, interactively.”
  • Old way of me achieving this
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colors\["(linkarzu_color\d+)"\]
"$1"
  • But with Astgrep
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colors[$A]
$A
\e (switch engine to astgrep)

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brew install ast-grep
  • Another example provided by maintainer
  • By mistake added / and now I need to replace it with . inside a require
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require($A)
return 'require(' .. vars.A:gsub('/', '.') .. ')'
*sample.lua
\x (lua interpreter)
\e (switch engine to astgrep)

Exclude files

  • I wanted to exclude 2 files from the replace, so added each file in a separate line under Files Filter:
    • !wezterm.lua
    • !eldritch.lua
  • But remember that it may be easier to treat the search results like a buffer, delete what you don’t want, and then replace

I don’t remember a flag or command

  • Just type –help in the Flags field, you’ll find all the docs and search
  • Also for help type g?
  • \p

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