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 the shell entities listed below into your command line. Tab to select multiple entries. If you trigger a search while your command line cursor is touching a word, that word will be used to seed the fzf query and will be replaced by your selection. All searches include a preview of the entity hovered over so you can seamlessly determine if it's what you're looking for. The previews also make fzf.fish a handy browsing tool.

File paths

• Search input: recursive listing of current directory's non-hidden files
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+Alt+F (F for file)
• Preview window: file with syntax highlighting, directory contents, or file type
• Remarks
  • appends / to directories selected so you can hit ENTER to immediately cd into it if it is the only token on the command line
  • if the current token is a directory with a trailing slash (e.g. .config/<CURSOR>), then that directory is searched instead
  • ignores files that are also ignored by git

Modified paths

• Search input: the current repository's git status
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+Alt+S (S for status)
• Preview window: the staged and unstaged changes in the file

Commit hashes

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

A previously run command

• Search input: Fish's command history
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+R (R for reverse-i-search)
• Preview window: the entire command with Fish syntax highlighting

Shell variables

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

Process ids

• Search input: the pid and command of all running processes, outputted by ps
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+Alt+P (P for process)
• Preview window: the CPU usage, memory usage, start time, and other information about the process

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

Installation

First, install a proper version of these CLI dependencies:

The search directory feature uses fd and bat to list and preview files. If your package manager doesn't install them as fd and bat respectively, then you can symlink them to those names.

Next, install this plugin with Fisher.

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

fisher install PatrickF1/fzf.fish

Configuration

Customize key bindings

fzf.fish includes an ergonomic wrapper for configuring its key bindings. Read its documentation with this command:

fzf_configure_bindings --help

Once you've determined the desired fzf_configure_bindings command, add it to your config.fish in order to persist the bindings.

Always pass some options to fzf

fzf supports setting default options via the FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS environment variable. If it is set, fzf implicitly prepends it to the options passed to it on every execution, scripted and interactive.

By default, fzf.fish will set a sane FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS every time before it executes fzf. However, if you export your own FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS variable, then fzf.fish will forgo setting it and yours will be used instead. See functions/_fzf_wrapper.fish for more details.

Pass fzf options for a specific feature

The following variables can store custom options that will be passed to fzf by their respective feature:

They are always appended last to fzf's argument list. Because fzf uses the option appearing last when options conflict, your custom options can override hardcoded options. Custom fzf options unlocks a variety of possibilities in customizing and augmenting each feature such as:

• add key bindings within fzf to operate on the selected line:
  • open file in Vim
  • preview image files
  • copy to clipboard
  • git checkout commit
  • git reset file
• adjust the preview command or window
• re-populate fzf's input list on demand
• change the search mode

Change the commands used to preview directories and regular files

The search directory feature, by default, calls ls to preview directories and bat to preview regular files.

To change the directory preview command (e.g. to use one of the many ls replacements such as exa), set the command in the fzf_preview_dir_cmd variable:

set fzf_preview_dir_cmd exa --all --color=always

And to change the file preview command (e.g. to cat to avoid installing a new dependency, or to add custom logic such as image preview), set the command in the fzf_preview_file_cmd variable:

set fzf_preview_file_cmd cat

Omit the target path for both variables as fzf.fish will itself specify the target to preview.

Change the files searched

To pass custom options to fd when it is executed to populate the list of files for the search directory feature, set the fzf_fd_opts variable. For example, to include hidden files but not .git, put this in your config.fish:

set fzf_fd_opts --hidden --exclude=.git

By default, fd hides files listed in .gitignore. You can disable this behavior by adding the --no-ignore flag to fzf_fd_opts.

Further reading

Find answers to these questions and more in the project Wiki:

• How does fzf.fish compare to other popular fzf plugins for Fish?
• Why isn't this feature working for me?
• How can I customize this feature?
• How can I contribute to this plugin?