So you've installed `fzf` – now what?

The intro irks me, though:

> Software engineers are, if not unique, then darn near unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives; this however can come at a steep cost over time for people who constantly flit back and forth between different tools without investing the time to learn their own kit in depth. As someone with a healthy respect for the tacit knowledge of people better than me, I think a great 80/20 heuristic is “Learn the oldies first”: venerable Unix tools like cat, ls, cd, grep, and cut. (sed and awk, too, if you have the good fortune of landing yourself in an actual modern sysadmin role.)

This seems to be either naive or hubristic in light of the thousands of years of history of craftspeople building their own workspaces. Even a hobbyist woodworker will build plenty of jigs and fixtures for their work. Machinists as well. Anyone whose work comprises building things is readily capable of applying those skills to make their work easier

I think the key line is the ease in which we can create tools. A software engineer has free access to the lumber yard. Builders of old had to work hard to create tools to create tools.

I also customize it so I can click the folder in the UI and open it in total commander.

Zsh snippet below in case it's helpful to anybody. With this in your .zshrc ctrl-r will search your shell history with fzf+atuin and ctrl-e will bring up atuin's own fuzzy finder in case you still want it.

It only searches the last 5000 entries of your atuin history for speed, but you can tweak ATUIN_LIMIT to your desired value if that's not optimal.

    atuin-setup() {
        if ! which atuin &> /dev/null; then return 1; fi
        bindkey '^E' _atuin_search_widget

        export ATUIN_NOBIND="true"
        eval "$(atuin init "$CUR_SHELL")"
        fzf-atuin-history-widget() {
            local selected num
            setopt localoptions noglobsubst noposixbuiltins pipefail no_aliases 2>/dev/null

            # local atuin_opts="--cmd-only --limit ${ATUIN_LIMIT:-5000}"
            local atuin_opts="--cmd-only"
            local fzf_opts=(
                --height=${FZF_TMUX_HEIGHT:-80%}
                --tac
                "-n2..,.."
                --tiebreak=index
                "--query=${LBUFFER}"
                "+m"
                "--bind=ctrl-d:reload(atuin search $atuin_opts -c $PWD),ctrl-r:reload(atuin search $atuin_opts)"
            )

            selected=$(
                eval "atuin search ${atuin_opts}" |
                    fzf "${fzf_opts[@]}"
            )
            local ret=$?
            if [ -n "$selected" ]; then
                # the += lets it insert at current pos instead of replacing
                LBUFFER+="${selected}"
            fi
            zle reset-prompt
            return $ret
        }
        zle -N fzf-atuin-history-widget
        bindkey '^R' fzf-atuin-history-widget
    }
    atuin-setup

I have a branch[0] where I'm trying to do things like reduce the user perceptible lag in search, the initial time of ingest, and add small features I need, etc (all done). I've tried to create PRs where I can, and they go unnoticed and unused.

One other thing I was trying to get a handle on is memory usage. The issue is -- you're implicitly creating objects with static lifetimes everywhere. Now try to refactor that, and there is a trait object held in a struct which depends on another trait object, so good luck figuring out the lifetimes. This is totally fine for a fuzzy finder tool, probably, but less fine when you drop a fuzzy find feature it into an app.

Love to have others interested in skim, and eager to work with anyone with big ideas about how to make it better. I'll have to try out atuin!

[0]: https://github.com/kimono-koans/two_percent