Getting started with fzf on Arch Linux

Default bash key bindings

Using whereis fzf, I found fzf's files for bash integration in usr/share/fzf:

completion.bash
key-bindings.bash

After sourceing both files, this enables a couple of keybindings for bash: For example, I can hit Ctrl + t to search files in the current directory and Ctrl + r to search my command history.

For finding and changing to a directory, there's Alt + c.

To make these key bindings persistent, I added them to my .bashrc:

source /usr/share/fzf/completion.bash && source /usr/share/fzf/key-bindings.bash

Customization

A customization I find useful is showing a file preview when using fzf (I put that in my .bashrc as well):

# When selecting files with fzf, we show file content with syntax highlighting,
# or without highlighting if it's not a source file. If the file is a directory,
# we use tree to show the directory's contents.
# We only load the first 200 lines of the file which enables fast previews
# of large text files.
# Requires highlight and tree: pacman -S highlight tree
export FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS="--preview '(highlight -O ansi -l {} 2> /dev/null ||
cat {} || tree -C {}) 2> /dev/null | head -200'"

Path completion

Out of the box, fzf supports fuzzy path completion for a couple of hard-coded commands like cd, ls, and vim.

For example, entering vim ** Tab on bash starts a fuzzy search in the current directory and opens the selected file with Vim¹.

This is pretty useful, but I'd like to open, for example, PDFs the same way. You can enable this by adding the following line to .bashrc:

complete -o bashdefault -o default -F _fzf_path_completion zathura

Here, zathura is my PDF viewer; you can substitute it with the document viewer of your choice.

Note that fuzzy path completion works for all paths, not only the current directory:

vim ~/**

and then hitting Tab will fuzzy-search a file under your home directory and then open it in Vim.

Vim integration

Here are some keybindings from my .vimrc to use fzf inside a Vim session:

" Search and switch buffers
nmap <leader>b :Buffers<cr>
" Find files by name under the current directory
nmap <leader>f :Files<cr>
" Find files by name under the home directory
nmap <leader>h :Files ~/<cr>
" Search content in the current file
nmap <leader>l :BLines<cr>
" Search content in the current file and in files under the current directory
nmap <leader>g :Ag<cr>

Prerequisite for all that is the fzf Vim plugin; I installed it with Plug by putting this in my .vimrc:

Plug 'junegunn/fzf.vim'

and then calling :PlugInstall from Vim.

Here is a list of fzf commands you can call from Vim.

Search files of project

Especially when working on software, I like to switch between files of a given project. Assuming that the project is versioned using Git, here's a binding that will fuzzy-search files inside the project and open the selected file:

nmap <leader>R :Files `=GetGitRoot()`<cr>

function! GetGitRoot()
  " Get the dir of the current file
  let currentDir = expand("%:p:h")
  " We stop when we find the .git/ dir or hit root
  while !isdirectory(currentDir . "/.git/") && currentDir !=# "/"
    " Make the parent the current dir
    let currentDir = fnamemodify(currentDir, ':h')
  endwhile
  return currentDir
endfunction

Going further

For a powerful combination of fzf, Vim, and Tmux, check out Keegan Lowenstein's blog post (I got the --preview configuration from there).

Here are some ideas on how to configure fzf's shell integration.

You can find more examples of fzf configuration in fzf's readme and in its wiki.

_{1 If you find yourself fuzzy-searching files and then opening them in Vim a lot, you can create a keybinding for that using this piece of .bashrc.}