How to integrate fzf for fuzzy finding
vifm
already has powerful search features such as :grep
and :locate
. However, it is possible to further expand its capabilities with fun and powerful programs such as fzf
"a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder."
Prerequisites
You need to have fzf installed. This method creates pipelines using the find
and locate
commands which are present in most Linux distributions.
Considerations
fzf
is a powerful and quick interactive filter in addition to working as a file searching utility by default. This method focuses on piping the output from locate $HOME
for quick traversal though the user's $HOME
directory and the output from find
for recursive traversal.
Examples
Commands
We can add the following two commands to vifmrc
:
command! FZFlocate :set noquickview | :execute 'goto "'.system('locate $HOME | fzf --height 10 2>/dev/tty ').'"%IU' | redraw
command! FZFfind :set noquickview | :execute 'goto "'.system('find | fzf --height 10 2>/dev/tty ').'"%IU' | redraw
In both examples fzf
will pop up on the bottom and allow us to filter the output of the feeder command. To prevent artifacts, vifm
's previews are switched off. Once our selection is made, fzf
will close and vifm
will advance the active pane to the directory of the selected file with the cursor highlighting it.
Options
vifm
will run its built in :goto
however other commands like :cd
should work if an appropriate list is piped to fzf
. As this is an example of process substitution (using the output of a command or commands as an argument for another command), we need to use the system()
function to run our searching/listing fzf
pipeline. To prevent visual artifacts in the terminal, we use the command macro %IU
and a call to :redraw
for extra safety.
Mappings
We can then add the following mappings to run these commands from normal mode:
nnoremap <c-g> :FZFlocate<cr>
nnoremap <c-f> :FZFfind<cr>
In this example I have chosen CTRL-g and CTRL-f.
Discussions
Here are some further links to discussion of fzf
and the system()
function: