fzz

README

fzz

Do one thing, do it well — multiple times!

fzz allows you to change the input of a single command interactively. Have a look and pay close attention to the bee's knees here:

Installation

go get github.com/mrnugget/fzz

Usage

The general usage pattern is this:

fzz [command with {{}} placeholder]

Example: using fzz and grep to search through all *.go files in the current directory.

fzz grep {{}} *.go

Running this presents you with a prompt that allows you to change the what grep will use as its search pattern by replacing {{}}.

After every change to the input fzz will rerun grep with the new input and show you what grep wrote to its STDOUT or, hopefully not, to its STDERR.

Once you're happy with the presented results simply press return to quit fzz and have the results printed to STDOUT.

Since the results will be printed to STDOUT you can use fzz with pipes:

fzz grep {{}} *.go | head -n 1 | awk -F":" '{print $1}'

And even better: fzz buffers its STDIN and passes it on to the specified command. That means you can put pipes all around it:

grep 'func' *.go | fzz grep {{}} | head -n 1

Usage Examples

Searching with ag

Use fzz to search through your current directory with the_silver_searcher interactively:

fzz ag {{}}

fzz and find for interactive file search

We can combine find and fzz to interactively search for files that match our input pattern:

fzz find ./Documents -iname "*{{}}*"

Use it in Vim to grep through your project

Use it as interactive project search in vim

:set grepprg=fzz\ ag\ \{\{\}\}

Then use :grep in Vim to start it. fzz will then fill the quickfix window with its results.

Interactively search files and open the results in your editor

Put this in your shell config and configure it to use your favorite editor:

vimfzz() {
  vim $(fzz ag {{}} | awk -F":" '{print $1}' | uniq)
}

TODO

• Man page
• Get rid of the TODOs in the code
• Add the ability to specify a first input value:
  • {{}} doesn't specify any input and waits for the user
  • {{foobar}} tells fzz to run the specified command with the initial input of foobar
• Change how fzz is printing its output to the TTY: instead of clearing the screen, jump to the first line, right after the input and rewrite the visible lines (padded so that all the columns are used and the previous output is not visible anymore)
• Maybe add some keybindings:
  • Ctrl-W: delete the last word from the input and rerun the command
  • Maybe selection of a line with Ctrl-J and Ctrl-K and the only print the selected line.

License

MIT, see LICENSE