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Comment by atilimcetin | Hacker News Reader

If you still don't know how useful fzf is, you should start with integrating fzf and ctrl+r (reverse search).

How do you do this, by the way? I used sudo apt install fzf and then realized I still have to set up the ctrl-r part.

I think I installed it differently on other systems previously, and those installs took care of the integration for me.

Try installing it from the source into eg. ~/.fzf and run ~/.fzf/install (if I remember correctly). It will offer to add bindings for ctrl-r etc. to the shell's rc file. Easy to update, just run git pull in ~/.fzf and install again.

I'll give that a shot. Thank you.

I'm on Fedora and add it to my zsh with this line:

https://github.com/peteryates/dotfiles/blob/master/zsh/.zshr...

Easy on its own but nonstandard, so it's annoying to manage every tool in its own way.

There are instructions for enabling it in the package manager docs: apt-cache show fzf

Use oh my zsh, then follow the instructions on the fzf page

I tried it, and removed the next day.

In my experience it's too fuzzy, and makes it impossible to find anything.

Try using it with the -e flag, it gives exact matches for each space-separated word you type, ignoring order and case. This is usually the most useful way to search in my experience. For example, if I'm searching through my filesystem I can give it "pdf pascal", it will give me all the Pascal-related PDF files. But it won't match paths like this just because the letters appear throughout the string:

  ~/books_and_papers/causal_inference.pdf
              ^^   ^ ^^   ^           ^^^

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