Mike Griffin

I’ve been using vimwiki for a little while to take notes as I work through the day. One issue that I had was that I had no easy way to search through older notes without dropping out of vim and manually searching.

I’ve also been using FZF loads and really like how it works, so I wanted to make use of that too.

With the fzf.vim I was almost where I wanted to get to. I could use :Ag to search through files in the current directory but this sometimes meant I was in the wrong place when I started the search.

A bit of searching led me to this GitHub issue where someone asked how to scope a search to a specified directory. I got pretty excited as this is exactly what I wanted to do!

After some playing around and trial and error, I eventually came up with this little snippet which I added to my ~/.vimrc

command! -bang -nargs=+ -complete=dir Rag call fzf#vim#ag_raw(<q-args>, {'options': '--delimiter : --nth 4..'}, <bang>0)
noremap <leader>v :Rag '^(?=.)' ~/Dropbox/vimwiki/<return>

The first command! creates a command that can be called as :Rag <search-term> <directory> and I’ve used the second line to map that to <leader>v. The strange looking '^(?=.)' was taken from the definition of fzf#vim#ag. I don’t fully understand it, but it allows a blank search string so that I don’t have to supply anything there and it brings up the full search that I can then type into. Lastly, I’ve set the directory to search to the one where I store my vimwiki files.