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So you've installed `fzf` – now what?

andrew-quinn.me

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Re: So you've installed `fzf` – now what?

#191

Post by dtgriscom »

yesenadam wrote: post #163
xxxtentachyon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's your use case, here's another game changer (one line bashrc change to make bash_history changes immediately, rather than upon shell exit, e.g. when you end your tmux session): https://web.archive.org/web/20090815205011/http://www.cuberi...

Thank you!! Why on earth isn't that the default. It always seemed weird that with multiple bash windows open, the commands from most of them weren't added to the history.

I often have three or more terminals open, doing different tasks in each; I also often have cycles of work where I'll repeat the last three commands again (three up-arrows and a return). This breaks if one terminal's commands get inserted into another terminal's history.

Re: So you've installed `fzf` – now what?

#192

Post by varenc »

endorphine wrote: post #32

Am I the only one that tried fzf as a replacement to the default Ctrl+R behavior, then switched back? I'm perfectly satisfied with the default Ctrl+R functionality, to the point that fzf seemed to add visual clutter without any value. I guess I was never let down by inverse search. Context: I'm using Linux and doing SWE and SRE work, and constantly live in the terminal.

I initially felt the same way and found it cluttered. Though I still left fzf-history around and bound it Ctrl+Alt+R so Ctrl+R could still be the default. In zsh I just did this with `bindkey '^[^R' fzf-history-widget`.

Over time I eventually found myself using Ctrl+Alt+R more and more so I made it the default and now Ctrl+Alt+R is still 'old school' history search for me.

Re: So you've installed `fzf` – now what?

#193

Post by dtgriscom »

brunoqc wrote: post #166
kelnos wrote: post #137

I'd never heard of fzf before! It looks like there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with it, but honestly, I think it's worth it even just to replace the frustrating ctrl+R search in bash, which I use a lot, but constantly dislike. I feel like with a lot of these kinds of tools, if I have to actually actively use them, I forget that they exist ('z'[0] ended up being like this for me) and eventually remove them, but s…

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Amen!

Re: So you've installed `fzf` – now what?

#194

Post by mattweinberg »

I'm a constant user of `fzf` and autojump (`j`) so combined them into this shell alias I use regularly:

  alias jf="cd \$(sort -nr ~/Library/autojump/autojump.txt | awk 'BEGIN {FS = \"\\t\"} {print \$2}' | fzf)"
or without the escaping:

  cd $(sort -nr ~/Library/autojump/autojump.txt | awk 'BEGIN {FS = "\t"} {print $2}' | fzf)
It gets my autojump history, sorts it by most used on top, extracts just the directory names, pipes the list to `fzf` and `cd`s into the selection. It's great because my most-used directories will be right on top of the `fzf` list.

Re: So you've installed `fzf` – now what?

#195

Post by dtgriscom »

endorphine wrote: post #32

Am I the only one that tried fzf as a replacement to the default Ctrl+R behavior, then switched back? I'm perfectly satisfied with the default Ctrl+R functionality, to the point that fzf seemed to add visual clutter without any value. I guess I was never let down by inverse search. Context: I'm using Linux and doing SWE and SRE work, and constantly live in the terminal.

There's a potential well of habit that you have to climb out of before you start getting a benefit. If you don't put in the energy to try it for a while, you'll slide back down into the well.

Re: So you've installed `fzf` – now what?

#196

Post by e12e »

spearman wrote: post #22

Thanks for this. I didn't know about the built-in-cd. For anyone on macOS trying to get Alt-C to work see https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/issues/164 .

It's also possible to "fix" the keyboard via ukulele - especially international layouts come with a lot of cruft under option-key.

Another possibility is to fix it via eg the terminal emulator - but that doesn't work for global hotkeys like window management with yabai via skhd.

See my comment on lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/nvoikx/helix_notes#c_m8guuh

Re: So you've installed `fzf` – now what?

#197

Post by yesenadam »

On mac 12.5 + bash + macports, having trouble getting anything to work, like Ctrl-R, Esc-C etc, **TAB complete, even after trying to follow the suggestions linked here.

The basic problem, however, is that whatever I type into the fuzzy search, it finds many thousands of hits. It seems it's picking up a lot of aliased Downloads folders in ~/Library/Containers. Anyone else have that problem? Not sure how to turn that off.

I just typed "abcdefghijklmno" trying to narrow it down, and still had 10 hits. Typing a further "p" reduced that to 2, but I could see most of those eliminated 8 had a "p" in the filename. Confusing!

edit: I got Ctrl-R, Esc-C and **TAB complete working by adding this to .bash_profile, not .bashrc as it said to when installing:

  source /opt/local/share/fzf/shell/key-bindings.bash
  source /opt/local/share/fzf/shell/completion.bash
But I still have many thousands of options for Esc-C cding, for example, whatever I type—mostly from ~/Library/Containers. I don't remember having that problem when I tried fzf a few years ago, on macos 10.13 I think.

Re: So you've installed `fzf` – now what?

#199

Post by aftbit »

shmerl wrote: post #30

fzf lua is a cool plugin for neovim: https://github.com/ibhagwan/fzf-lua So you don't need to do stuff like vi $(find . '/' | fzf) And instead can use fzf from inside the editor. It also supports integrating it with fdfind and ripgrep.

I use ctrlp.vim in vanilla vim with fzf.

https://github.com/ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim

Re: So you've installed `fzf` – now what?

#200

Post by b3morales »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #13

Fantastic article. I was exactly in the situation the article describes, I installed it, then, didn't find a use case. But that's because Ubuntu doesn't come with completion enabled by default. You have to add in your bashrc: if [ -e /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/key-bindings.bash ]; then source /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/key-bindings.bash fi The fzf and ubuntu docs don't mention you have to. Couldn't find easily how…

You do have to remember to use it, but the thing to keep in mind is that you can pipe a list of ANYTHING into it. Any list of text items you can search through with a text query is fair game.

   git log --oneline | fzf
for example is one of my favorite tricks. Instead of scanning by eye or repeatedly grepping to find something, it's a live fuzzy filter. And depending on how deep you want to go you can then add key bindings to check out the selected commit, or preview the full message, or anything really.
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