Include File Searches

Include file searches (:help include-search) can be useful for navigating around large files. You can do things like:

• List the first line that contains the keyword under the cursor
• List all lines that match the keyword under the cursor
• Jump to the first line that contains the keyword under the cursor

Although this feature is tailored to C by default, it can be adapted to work with other languages with some configuration.

Examples

Displaying the first line that matches the keyword

Download jquery-2.0.3.js and open it in Vim. Move the cursor to line 35 (35G) then move the cursor over document and press [i. At the bottom of the screen you'll see document = window.document, -- Vim is indicating the first match of this keyword from the start of the file. You can also try ]i which shows the next match from the cursor's position.

Now move to line 38 and press [I (that's capital i) over _jQuery. You will see two matches this time.

Displaying all matches

This is pretty basic, but you’ll notice this feature doesn’t really need any specific programming language parsing support. The commands we’ve looked at will even work with plain text.

Included Files

What makes this feature useful for C programmers, though, is it will search through included files as well. To configure how Vim loads files from the file system, you need to use :set include="some pattern". See :set 'include' for help.

I tried to make this work with Node’s CommonJS module system. I couldn’t get it working, but I did find an article that includes some more advanced ideas for supporting CommonJS: VimTip: complétion JavaScript. It’s really about completion, but the .vimrc example uses 'include', 'includeexpr', and 'suffixesadd' to make Vim figure out the Node's module loading rules.

function! JsIncludeExpr(file)
  if (filereadable(a:file))
    return a:file
  else
    let l:file2=substitute(substitute(a:file,'\\.js$','','g'),'$','/index.js','g')
    return l:file2
  endif
endfunction
function s:setJSOptions()
  set omnifunc=javascriptcomplete#CompleteJS
  set path+=./node_modules/**,node_modules/**
  set include=require(.\\zs[^'\"]*\\ze
  set includeexpr=JsIncludeExpr(v:fname)
  set suffixesadd=.js
endfunction
autocmd FileType javascript call s:setJSOptions()

So, remember that [i and [I can be useful, and can be bent to your will.