Getting started with fzf command

Introduction

fzf is a general purpose command-line fuzzy finder written in go programming language. You can find it [here] (“https://github.com/junegunn/fzf”). The official website describes fzf as:

It’s an interactive Unix filter for command-line that can be used with any list; files, command history, processes, hostnames, bookmarks, git commits, etc.

Getting started

If you run fzf without any argument then it will search all files in the current directory.

fzf

Note that fzf updates the matches dynamically while you type the search terms in any order.

Because fzf prints the selection into stdout, we can use this output as input for another command such as vim.

Preview the file

We will use bat and fzf together.

fzf --preview 'bat --color=always {}'

Configuration of fzf

To avoid typing this option every time, you can set the environment variable FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS to apply it automatically every time you run fzf:

export FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS="--preview 'bat --color~always {}'"

By default fzf uses find command, but we want to use fd command.

export FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND="fd --type f"