Re: How to search all open buffers?

[Emilio Lopes]

Eric Hanchrow writes:

>>>>>> "kj" == kj  <socyl@987jk.com.invalid> writes:

kj> What's the Emacs command to search for a string in all the open
kj> buffers?

> As far as I know, the only way to do it is

>         M-x multi-occur-in-matching-buffers RET . RET your-search-string RET

> which is not only awkward, but I swear sometimes it's failed to find
> hits that I know where present.

Maybe because it matches by default against *visited* file names; if
you buffer isn't visiting any file, you lose.  If you want the regexp
to match against buffer names you need to specify a prefix argument.

Yes, its name is deceiving and the sense of the prefix argument should
probably be inverted.  I've just reported a bug.

> A more reliable, but even more awkward way, is

>         M-x ibuffer RET * * RET t O your-search-string RET

I find this more comfortable indeed, since you can mark the buffers
you care about in different ways (by mode, by name, ...).

-- 
Emílio C. Lopes
Munich, Germany