Fzf: Can Do Far More Than Just Fuzzy Find Your Files

Fzf is a program like dmenu that most people run at some point and use it for what it's generally used for but not much outside of that now it turns out that like dmenu you can have some fun with fzf. Today we're going to have a look through some of the cool things you can with fzf as a fuzzy finder for you files as well as a few other cool uses.

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[BrodieRobertson]

Do you use fzf on your system as more than just a fuzzy finder, such as an application launcher, an option selector for another program etc. or are you just going to use it's basic purpose. Let me know your thoughts down below.

[thomaspsteven]

I never thought about piping things to fzf before. If I ever had a long list I would pipe it to grep. fzf is way better than grep for a lot of things I want to do. Thanks man.

[noscreadur]

Really inspiring video: I had a couple of presentable option pickers knocked up before the vid ended. This was a good one!

[thescrawl]

I am super surprised at how much fzf can do. The preview window is especially useful. Its almost like a full file manager at this point.

[MrDeejayjfx]

You know whats so cool about fzf works vifm too :D

[dasgregor]

Very interesting, I really like your CLI tool topics. I will have to look for it in Gentoo

[mrchauhan]

Hi As I know it does not work with .... Csh/Tcsh shell. Can you help in this regards.... Mostly it is that we can not use key-binding and can not select multiple files.
Thanks
Anurag

[BillyWayneMcCann]

for me, ‘rc’ is a function that calls ‘nvim $(cat rc-files | fzf)’ where rc-files contains a list of config files.

[mrchauhan]

After passing file content to fzf (fzf < myFile.txt) is there anyway to select multiple lines to show on terminal or capture these lines in to other It will be great to parse a big log file on the fly.

Thanks
It will be great if I can get some help on this.

[Justanoobcoder]

sudo pacman -Fy; pacman -Slq | fzf --height=100% --multi --preview='pacman -Si {1}' | xargs -ro sudo pacman -S --needed
This line is "packages finder". It will help you find and install any packages in arch main repo, you can do the same thing with yay (but it's kinda slow becuz aur has so many packages). It also displays a preview about package's info. This is slower than just sudo pacman -S but it's really useful when you don't know the exact name of the package. Also this line will help you remove packages which are installed on your machine
yay -Qqe | fzf --height=100% --multi --preview 'yay -Si {1}' | xargs -ro yay -Rns

[Imjoshnewton]

I find a lot of the layout options more useful when using fzf-tmux -p to create a tmux popup. With a popup, controlling the size, border, reversing the layout, etc can be handy.

[schlimmpf]

Nice, a while back I was trying to get fzf to work as the frontent for a prompt in xmonad, but I ran into some issues with the terminal emulator not showing up as a window when used as a command in the existing prompt system.
This video reminds me that I need to go back and figure out what was wrong with that

[example]

Is that --preview pistol app via Engineering Man's Discord bot? Doh... piston. Looks like not... caught my eye. Do a review of Piston !

[techtutorials]

I think the --min-height flag is because --height is a percent instead of an absolute number. So if you set it to, for example, 25%, and your terminal was 100 lines tall, it would be 25 lines tall. But if your terminal was only 24 lines tall (for whatever reason), without the --min-height flag, it would be only 6 lines tall. With --min-height=10 (the default), it would be 10 lines instead of 6, because 10 is the minimum.

[omegaroguelp]

One use for changing the height is for example in a zsh plugin i use, which replaces the zsh completion handler to fzf

[asdfkjhlk]

Alias to pipe .histfile into fzf so i can search history and execute directly from it

[ironmanlifts]

Thanks for the video I love fzf. The work around I did for finding files from the start of the word is to pipe find with grep -P then feed to fzf. I posted some code but my comment got deleted.

[AlejodelosReyes]

Use it as an autojump replacement with an zsh alias:
alias fcd='cd $({find /home/*directories to search/ -type d; find /mnt/ i -maxdepth2 -type d} | fzf)'

[Max-bhtg]

How can i open the selection of fzf with nvim?

[Babbler]

I've created a few script with fzf for opening things on my desktop (running AwesomeWM solo for now). One is a just a file finder (using my own custom previewer), but I also have one for opening directories and opening man pages.


Note that fzf comes with some zsh widgets: C-r opens (reverse) history search, C-t open inser(T?) a file path into the line and A-c can cd into another directory. It would be great if I could add a simple ls for the latter, previewing the directory you want to cd into.


BTW, you can scroll up-down the previewer with s-up/down.