Vim's :*do Family of Commands

by Noah Frederick | 2017/09/12

Vim has a class of commands that execute their arguments in the context of each of a collection of entities, including tab pages, windows, buffers, items in the arg list, etc. Here is a summary:

Command	Applies to
`:tabdo`	Tab pages
`:windo`	Windows in the current tab
`:bufdo`	Buffers
`:argdo`	Files in the arg list
`:cdo`	Entries in the quickfix list
`:cfdo`	Files in the quickfix list
`:ldo`	Entries in the location list
`:lfdo`	Files in the location list

Each of these commands takes another command as its argument. For example, to replace the string “Emacs” with “Vim” in all buffers:

:bufdo %s/Emacs/Vim/g

Commands can be combined with | to perform multiple actions, so we can also write the changes from the substitution with :update in the same invocation:

:bufdo %s/Emacs/Vim/g | update

Finally, the :*do commands take a range to restrict the items iterated over. To apply a substitution only to the first three entries of the quickfix list:

:1,3cdo s/Emacs/Vim/g

Further Reading