Managing a flat file html website cut for a client resulted in not being able to manage the main navigation and side navigation with includes and I quickly needed a way to update all the navigation and links across all the files. Vim to the rescue.
First, select all your files you wish to edit and send them to vim and the buffer:
Then type what files within those you want to parse by. In this case I want all of them so I just specify:
:args *.html
This will search all files ending in “.html”.
Then I want to substitute a specific word with another:
:argdo %s/>Enterprise solutionsEnterprise services
The /'s act as separators for each phrase we're searching for. In this case ">Enterprise services< " and we'll be replacing it with ">Enterprise services<". After that, the "g" stands for global: meaning the whole file, and "e" meaning don't complain about not finding the term or throw errors up during the process. The pipe "|" means do something after this and "update" means save the file.
If you're using svn, you'll see a nice visual of all the files changed at the end as in my screenshot above.