fzf

About

fzf

• Official introduction. https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#usage
• Some keywords or fzf (by ChatGPT)

  Fuzzy Finder
  Interacitve Filtering

fzf.vim

fzf itself is not a Vim plugin, and the official repository only provides the basic wrapper function for Vim. It's up to the users to write their own Vim commands with it. However, I've learned that many users of fzf are not familiar with Vimscript and are looking for the "default" implementation of the features they can find in the alternative Vim plugins.

How to Integrate fzf to vim

Steps

1. Install fzf plugin (based on Vundle)

    # edit .vimrc 
    Plugin 'junegunn/fzf'
    Plugin 'junegunn/fzf.vim'
    # install them
    :PluginInstall junegunn/fzf junegunn/fzf.vim
   

2. Call fzf within vim

    :FZF
   

   if fzf is not installed yet, a no binary found like error would be returned. To fix this, just install the binary file of fzf. Another solution is to configure this in .vimrc

    # .vimrc   
    Plugin 'junegunn/fzf', {'do': { -> fzf#install()}}
   

3. Get familiar with fzf plugin (optional)

    :help fzf
    # mainly focus of fzf:run and fzf:wrap
    # for example,
    # :call fzf#run({'source': 'git ls-files', 'sink': 'e'})
    # and how to define a custom function:
    # command! -bang -complete=dir -nargs=? LS call fzf#run(fzf#wrap({'source': 'ls', 'dir': <q-args>}, <bang>0))
    # -bang
   

4. Think about how to support a most common scenarios, with fzf

   • Work within a project
   • Search all the files under this project, with some text
   • Preview the context of matched text in the file, similar as grep keywork -A 5 -B 5

   The first idea is, define a function based on fzf#run and fzf#wrap to accept the pattern and directory. That's right. Actually, it turns out such scenarios are already supported by fzf.vim. Just,

    :help Rg
    # from the manual, we could the definitaion of it
    # `Rg`       |  `fzf#vim#grep(command, [spec dict], [fullscreen bool])`
   

   Ok, just try this command

    :Rg test
   

   Get an error command failed, and no file matched at all. Why? Check the source code of fzf.vim, and find this

    \'command! -bang -nargs=* Rg call fzf#vim#grep("rg --column --line-number --no-heading --color=always --smart-case -- ".shellescape(<q-args>), fzf#vim#with_preview(), <bang>0)',
   

   Looks like :Rg is call rg to get the source files. And it turns out rg (ripgrep) is not installed. Install it

    brew install ripgrep
   

5. Now everything is OK. To make Rg command to accept more options, we can update it like this

    # key points:
    # remove the `--` to accept more options
    # remove the call to `shellescape`
    # use `.` to connect 2 strings
    # with, the `Rg` command cannot work without agrs. That's to say, it must be called like this:
    # `:Rg -w -i Test internal/*` 
    command! -bang -nargs=* Rg call fzf#vim#grep("rg --column --line-number --no-heading --color=always " . <q-args>, fzf#vim#with_preview(), <bang>0)
   

Questions

• How to grep multiple times (grep pattern_1 | grep pattern_2 | grep pattern_n) as a pipeline with Rg or fzf.vim?

References

• Introductions of fzf.vim. https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.vim/blob/master/README.md
• Plugin manual. :help fzf
• Source code of fzf.vim. https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.vim/blob/master/plugin/fzf.vim#L57