Re: How to search through all buffers?

[John Paul Wallington <jpw@gnu.org>]

Eric Hanchrow <offby1@blarg.net> wrote:

> I'd like to find all the occurrences of a particular word in all my
> Emacs buffers, but cannot think of a way to do it short of writing my
> own Elisp.  Is there in fact a way?

With Emacs CVS HEAD (which you appear to be using) you can mark your
buffers in Ibuffer then press O.  Or use the `multi-occur' or
`multi-occur-by-filename-regexp' commands.  If the interactivity is
tiresome, how about something like this (lightly tested):

(defun hanchrow-all-encompassing-occur (regexp &optional hidden-bufs-too)
  "Show all lines in all visible buffers containing a match for REGEXP.
With prefix arg HIDDEN-BUFS-TOO, show lines matching in all buffers."
  (interactive (occur-read-primary-args))
  (if (interactive-p)
      (setq hidden-bufs-too current-prefix-arg))
  (multi-occur (if hidden-bufs-too
		   (buffer-list)
		 (delq nil
		       (mapcar (lambda (buf)
				 (unless (string-match "^ " (buffer-name buf))
				   buf))
			       (buffer-list))))
	       regexp))