fzf.fish 🔍🐟

Augment your Fish command line with mnemonic key bindings to efficiently find what you need using fzf.

Features

Use fzf.fish to interactively find and insert into the command line:

File paths

• Search input: recursive listing of current directory's files
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+F (F for file)
• Preview window: file with syntax highlighting, directory contents, or file type
• Remarks
  • prepends ./ to the selection if only one selection is made and it becomes the only token on the command line, making it easy to execute if an executable, or cd into if a directory (see cd docs)
  • if the current token is a directory with a trailing slash (e.g. functions/<CURSOR>), then search will be scoped to that directory
  • ignores files that are also ignored by git
  • Tab to multi-select

Modified paths

• Search input: the current repository's git status
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+Alt+S (S for status, Alt to prevent overriding pager-toggle-search)
• Remarks: Tab to multi-select

A commit hash

• Search input: the current repository's formatted git log
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+Alt+L (L for log, Alt to prevent overriding clear screen)
• Preview window: commit message and diff

A previously run command

• Search input: the command history from all interactive sessions of Fish
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+R (R for reverse-i-search)

A shell variable

• Search input: all the variable names of the environment, both local and exported
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+V (V for variable)
• Preview window: the scope info and values of the variable
• Remarks
  • $history is excluded for technical reasons so use the search command history feature instead to inspect it

The prompt used in the screencasts was created using IlanCosman/tide.

Installation

First, make sure you're using Fish 3.1.2 or newer.

$ fish --version
fish, version 3.1.2

Next, install with Fisher.

fzf.fish can be installed manually or with other plugin managers but only Fisher is officially supported.

fisher install PatrickF1/fzf.fish

Finally, install the following CLI tools:

• fzf - command-line fuzzy finder that powers this plugin
• fd - much faster and friendlier alternative to find
• bat - smarter cat with syntax highlighting (used to preview files)

For macOS, I recommend installing them using brew.

On certain distribution of Linux, you will need to alias fdfind to fd (see #93).

Configuration

Using custom key bindings

If you would like to customize the key bindings, first, prevent the default key bindings from executing by setting fzf_fish_custom_keybindings as an universal variable. You can do this with

set --universal fzf_fish_custom_keybindings

Do not try to set fzf_fish_custom_keybindings in your config.fish because the key binding configuration is sourced first on shell startup and so will not see it.

Next, set your own key bindings by following conf.d/fzf.fish as an example.

Fzf default options

fzf supports setting default options via the FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS environment variable. If it is set, fzf will implicitly prepend its value to the options passed in on every execution, scripted or interactive.

To make fzf's interface friendlier, fzf.fish takes the liberty of setting a sane FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS if it is not already set. See conf.d/fzf.fish for more details. This affects fzf even outside of this plugin. If you would like to remove this side effect or just want to customize fzf's default options, then set your own FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS universal variable. For example:

set --universal --export FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS --height 50% --margin 1

Alternatively, you can override it in your config.fish:

set --export FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS --height 50% --margin 1

Changing the command used to preview folders

The search files feature, by default, uses ls -A -F to preview the contents of a directory. To integrate with the variety of ls replacements available, the command used to preview directories is configurable through the fzf_preview_dir_cmd variable. For example, in your config.fish, you may put:

set fzf_preview_dir_cmd exa --all --color=always

Do not specify a target path in the command, as fzf.fish will prepend the directory to preview to the command itself.

Change the key binding or Fzf options for a single command

See the FAQ Wiki page.

Prior art

If fzf.fish is a useful plugin, it is by standing on the shoulder of giants. There are two other fzf integrations for Fish worth regarding: jethrokuan/fzf and fzf's out-of-the-box Fish extension. The Prior Art Wiki page explains how fzf.fish compares to and improves on them.

Troubleshooting & FAQ

Need help? These Wiki pages can guide you:

• Troubleshooting
• FAQ