Facebook PathPicker

#1

Post by ben_hall » Thu, May 07, 2015, 5:13 PM UTC

Re: Facebook PathPicker

#2

Post by xxbondsxx » Thu, May 07, 2015, 5:21 PM UTC

Hey everyone, I'm in the main engineer on this project if anyone has questions.

Facebook has a large codebase, so naturally we have a lot of long filenames and paths. It's a pain to type these out by hand, so I'd see a lot of (new) engineers select the text with their mouse before pasting it into the command line.

This is pretty inefficient and I knew there had to be a better way, so a few of us started hacking on a set of python regexes and a curses UI. Before long we had a pretty simple / easy command line utility that sped up everyones' day.

After a while we realized this would probably be helpful to all, so we open sourced it today!

Re: Facebook PathPicker

#3

Post by Splendor » Thu, May 07, 2015, 5:25 PM UTC

xxbondsxx wrote: post #2

Hey everyone, I'm in the main engineer on this project if anyone has questions. Facebook has a large codebase, so naturally we have a lot of long filenames and paths. It's a pain to type these out by hand, so I'd see a lot of (new) engineers select the text with their mouse before pasting it into the command line. This is pretty inefficient and I knew there had to be a better way, so a few of us started hacking on a…

This looks very useful. Thanks for sharing it.

Re: Facebook PathPicker

#4

Post by sheldonk » Thu, May 07, 2015, 5:30 PM UTC

This reminds me of https://github.com/mooz/percol

Re: Facebook PathPicker

#5

Post by michaelmior » Thu, May 07, 2015, 5:32 PM UTC

I use fzf[0] for similar purposes.

[0] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Re: Facebook PathPicker

#6

Post by aristus » Thu, May 07, 2015, 5:36 PM UTC

xxbondsxx wrote: post #2

Hey everyone, I'm in the main engineer on this project if anyone has questions. Facebook has a large codebase, so naturally we have a lot of long filenames and paths. It's a pain to type these out by hand, so I'd see a lot of (new) engineers select the text with their mouse before pasting it into the command line. This is pretty inefficient and I knew there had to be a better way, so a few of us started hacking on a…

Good work! when I was at FB I rolled my own, called "gitsh":

https://gist.github.com/aristus/2304335

One of the most useful features is range selection syntax, eg, run git rm on items 4-16.

Re: Facebook PathPicker

#7

Post by xxbondsxx » Thu, May 07, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

michaelmior wrote: post #5

I use fzf[0] for similar purposes. [0] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Yeah fzf is great -- there are a few differences since PathPicker can execute any command with the selected file(s) (rather than just write it to stdout) and runs in tmux with no issues, but fzf has great vim integration and I believe actually verifies the file matches.

Glad more people are working in the productivity space though!

Re: Facebook PathPicker

#8

Post by staz » Thu, May 07, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

xxbondsxx wrote: post #2

Hey everyone, I'm in the main engineer on this project if anyone has questions. Facebook has a large codebase, so naturally we have a lot of long filenames and paths. It's a pain to type these out by hand, so I'd see a lot of (new) engineers select the text with their mouse before pasting it into the command line. This is pretty inefficient and I knew there had to be a better way, so a few of us started hacking on a…

Look pretty nice. Have you considered integrating fuzzy finding in it? Or making it cooperate with fzf?

Re: Facebook PathPicker

#9

Post by itsbits » Thu, May 07, 2015, 5:39 PM UTC

xxbondsxx wrote: post #2

Hey everyone, I'm in the main engineer on this project if anyone has questions. Facebook has a large codebase, so naturally we have a lot of long filenames and paths. It's a pain to type these out by hand, so I'd see a lot of (new) engineers select the text with their mouse before pasting it into the command line. This is pretty inefficient and I knew there had to be a better way, so a few of us started hacking on a…

do we need to open any specific mode in terminal for FPP?

Re: Facebook PathPicker

#10

Post by xxbondsxx » Thu, May 07, 2015, 5:41 PM UTC

sheldonk wrote: post #4

This reminds me of https://github.com/mooz/percol

Percol was actually a source of inspiration as well, but I got tired of typing things like:

git checkout $(git branch | percol)

Since I had to almost compose my command beforehand rather than decide once I saw the output. So we take the opposite approach. Great UI though!