QuickFind

QuickFind is a set of two small command-line utilities utilizing the same fuzzy matching algorithm:

• qfind to quickly find files and directories, and
• qselect to quickly select a string from a list of strings

qfind grew out of frustration towards the classic find . -type f | grep approach when either trying match several parts of the file path, or not having a very clear recollection of what was the exact name of the file to be searched.

qselect is pretty much a direct replacement for selecta, the main difference being that it should be quite a bit faster since it's been written in C++ instead of Ruby.

Demo

qfind

qfind is very simple file/directory search program, its invocation being

qfind [-adf] [pattern] [path...]

Without any command line arguments qfind will list all files and directories reachable from current working directory. With search pattern, it will only return matching names. Restricting the search to certain subdirectories is done by listing the directory names after search pattern.

Option -a will include also hidden files/directories, -f shows only files and -d shows only directories.

Examples

• find . - type f, i.e. all files under current directory

qfind -f

• Find the songs for Black Sabbath's Album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath from my music library

qfind -f blackbloody

• Find out where'd I put qselect.cpp

qfind -f qselectcpp

Incidentally, the last search takes about 300 milliseconds on my computer, inside a source directory containing about 90000 files inside 18000 directories.

qselect

qselect works pretty much like its role model selecta. It reads the list of search strings from standard input, presents a search UI to the user, and then either prints selection to its standard out or prints nothing and exits with status of 1.

The search UI is presented by opening /dev/tty and reading/writing there, so that when qselect is used in a pipeline, only the selected string will be written to stdout.

qselect has a few useful key bindinings to control the search UI:

• Ctrl-C will exit the program with an error status (1) and prints nothing
• Ctrl-U clears the search string
• Ctrl-N and Ctrl-P select the next and previous match from the presented list
• Enter selects the highlighted match and prints it to standard out

To search the contents of a file use the following command

qselect < <path to file>

now you can type the keywords and get the appropriate results.

Install using Homebrew

brew install nkauppila/homebrew-quickfind/quickfind

Building and installing

To build and install both programs, just run

$ make && make install

By default the Makefile will try to install the programs under /usr; this can be changed using prefix variable, e.g.

$ make prefix=$HOME && make install prefix=$HOME

Algorithm

The programs both use the same fuzzy matching algorithm: a weighted subsequence match, i.e. all the characters of the search string must be present in the target string in order, but not necessarily adjacent. As a useful heuristic the algorithm gives larger weight to input strings that have the characters of the search string adjacent to each other.

For example, searching for "qfind" will find both qfind and quickfind, but qfind will be sorted earlier because it matches exactly whereas q is separate from the rest of the match characters in quickfind.