Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
101 lines (67 loc) · 3.82 KB

use_fzf.md

File metadata and controls

101 lines (67 loc) · 3.82 KB
Raw

Use fzf

fzf is a funky command line fuzzy searcher.

Use your normal reverse history search and see fzf work it's magic.

<ctrl>-r

WSL Installation

If you want to use it under WSL with Ubuntu. I recommend installing from Git:

$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.git ~/.fzf
$ ~/.fzf/install

If you follow the standard documentation, you will observe several errors:

.fzf/install: line 2: $'\r': command not found
: invalid optionne 3: set: -
set: usage: set [-abefhkmnptuvxBCHP] [-o option-name] [--] [arg ...]
.fzf/install: line 4: $'\r': command not found
.fzf/install: line 14: $'\r': command not found
.fzf/install: line 15: syntax error near unexpected token `$'{\r''
'fzf/install: line 15: `help() {

This all boils down to Bash using CRLF on Ubuntu on WSL, so you have to convert the script, using a tool like dos2unix

$ dos2unix ~/.fzf/install

The installation runs and you have to follow up with the following conversions:

$ dos2unix ~/.fzf/shell/key-bindings.bash

And you are good to go...

<ctrl>-r

Ubuntu installation

I recently installed fzf on Ubuntu, unfortunately you get a very old version: 0.44.1-1. So you should consider installing from Git. You can also see this in the package status list for fzf.

The reason for installing using the regular package manager is for ease of maintenance, which then comes at a cost.

The fzf installation guide outlines this process:

# Set up fzf key bindings and fuzzy completion
eval "$(fzf --bash)"

Which is not supported until version: 0.48.0 as mentioned in the note beneath the installation instructions.

You can however use the two files from shell/ directory in the fzf repository

  • completion.bash
  • key-bindings.bash

When sourcing these via my .bashrc, I get not warnings, but the moment I press <ctrl>-r I get the following error:

unknown option: --wrap-sign

Which is a problem, since it seems that the fzf version is not compatible with the key-bindings.bash file and --wrap-sign was not introduced until version 0.54.0.

I did clone the repository, so I could use the files in the shell/ directory, but now I get a maintenance mix of versions and management options for a single tool.

  • I could hard-copy the key-bindings.bash file and remove the --wrap-sign option, but I would rather use the fzf version from the repository
  • I could checkout the GitHub repository at a certain revision, but then I would have to manage the version myself

So I recommend rolling with the repository based installation. Also because the Linux distributions are moving slower that GitHub.

When using the repository based installation, you can use the following command to install fzf:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.git ~/src/fzf
~/src/fzf/install

Do note the src/ directory, which is a personal preference of mine, based on a recommendation from when installing: nordtheme/dircolors.

Then I can collect repositories I only consume and not mix these up with own repositories, forks at what not.

Resources and References