Boost Your Command-Line Productivity With Fuzzy Finder

Level up your CLI skills with fzf

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

Apr 7th update:
* Added chrome bookmark browser for macOS

As developers, when coding, we spend most of our time on IDEs and/or text editors, and although they do a great job abstracting lower-level commands to build, test, run, and debug our code, eventually you will find yourself having to run a command or change a file through the command line.

You can get by just fine with built-in commands and POSIX utilities like pwd, ls, cd, mv, cp, rm, mkdir, touch,cat, grep, find, etc.

But if you want to boost your productivity when working with CLI tools, fzf is:

“An interactive Unix filter for the command line that can be used with any list; files, command history, processes, hostnames, bookmarks, git commits, etc.” — fzf

fzf preview

In this article, I will show you how to configure and customize fzf, along with examples of how it can be used as a productivity booster.

Table of Contents

· Installation
· Usage
  ∘ Key bindings
  ∘ Fuzzy completion alias
  ∘ Search syntax
· Customization
  ∘ Finder layout
  ∘ Preview window
  ∘ Color and UI configuration
  ∘ Key bindings
  ∘ Setting options as default
· Advanced Examples
  ∘ Changing the default command
  ∘ Forgit
  ∘ Searching file contents
  ∘ Docker
  ∘ Homebrew
  ∘ npm
  ∘ z
  ∘ Chrome bookmark browser (macOS)
· Similar Tools
  ∘ Broot

Installation

You can install fzf on Linux, macOS, and Windows. If you are on macOS or Linux, it’s available via Homebrew and Linuxbrew, to install it, run:

brew install fzf

For Windows and other options, visit the official installation page on GitHub.

It’s also recommended to install the key bindings and fuzzy completion:

$(brew --prefix)/opt/fzf/install