When comparing vimgrep vs Grep, the Slant community recommends Grep for most people. In the question“What are the best open source tools for searching source code?” Grep is ranked 3rd while vimgrep is ranked 5th.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Supports extented regular expressions
Using the \v string at the start of the pattern enables magic (extended regular expressions)
Pro Built in to Vim
You don't need to install any plugins to use vimgrep, it comes built in to vim.
Pro Preinstalled on every Unix like system
Pro Searches any text file
Pro Reads from STDIN
You can search the output of any command just by piping into grep
.
Pro Searches multiple files
It is possible to instruct grep to search through multiple files specified on the command line or entire directory trees.
Pro Full PCRE regex support
Pro Fast
Searches through large collections of files well before the expected time.
Cons
Con Slower than external grep solutions
External grep programs can be much faster
Con Hard to filter by file type
Want to search for my_function in PHP files only? find . -name '*.php' -exec grep my_function '{}' ;
Con Multiple, not fully compatible, implementations
The most known 2 are: BSD and GNU implementations which slightly differ in their capabilities and performance.