What is fzf? How could I’ve lived without it for so long?! It’s just a pretty little fuzzy search tool, written in go. You can find it here: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Important features

• fuzzy search in a list of lines - thanks to that, it’s really easy to find something in a considerably big list of items
• it’s blazingly fast!
• very nice shell integrations
• many additional features - like preview for files (go here to see examples: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#preview-window)

Usages

• shell history
• my git-commit message script
• various CLI python tools, using this wrapper https://github.com/nk412/pyfzf

Browsing through shell history

This is simply the most useful feature for me. Previously, I’ve extensively used ctrl+r to search through the past commands, but doing this with fzf is much more powerful!

Adding fzf to all kinds of small scripts

Here are two small shell functions that do some small things, also utilizing fzf along the way.

function activate-venv() {
  local selected_env
  selected_env=$(ls ~/VirtualEnvs/ | fzf)

  if [ -n "$selected_env" ]; then
    source "$HOME/VirtualEnvs/$selected_env/bin/activate"
  fi
}

function delete-branches() {
  local branches_to_delete
  branches_to_delete=$(git branch | fzf --multi)

  if [ -n "$branches_to_delete" ]; then
    git branch --delete --force $branches_to_delete
  fi
}