Since moving to vim from Sublime Text 2 the one thing I have been less than happy with is find and replace in files. This seems to be the accepted solution:
:args app/views/*/*
:argdo %s/search/replace/ge | update
The problem with this way though is that it's adding a bunch of files that don't need to be searched and taking up a lot more memory than it needs to. This also loads folders and files which cause errors when vim tries to parse them. After a lot of experimentation I've come up with a better solution. Using ack I only add the files that contain the search parameters which saves a lot of ram.
:args `ack -l keywords`
:argdo %s/keywords/replacement/ge | update
This works great but is still a lot of typing so after messing around with it a bit more I came up with the solution of typing /search/replace/ into whatever file I'm in on a new line and then hitting <Leader>fr to remove the line and use it to find and replace in files. Here is the section from my .vimrc that deals with find replace.
" Finds and replaces in files based on the the current line.
map <Leader>fr ^l"ayt/^v$h"byu:vsp<CR>:args `ack -l <C-R>a`<CR>:argdo %s<C-R>bge \| update<CR>
" Same as above but asks before all the changes.
map <Leader>far ^l"ayt/^v$h"byu:vsp<CR>:args `ack -l <C-R>a`<CR>:argdo %s<C-R>bgce \| update<CR>