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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic article.

I was exactly in the situation the article describes, I installed it, then, didn't find a use case.

But that's because Ubuntu doesn't come with completion enabled by default.

You have to add in your bashrc:

    if [ -e /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/key-bindings.bash ]; then
      source /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/key-bindings.bash
    fi

The fzf and ubuntu docs don't mention you have to.

Couldn't find easily how to do it with google, but chatgpt saved the day once again.

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You do have to remember to use it, but the thing to keep in mind is that you can pipe a list of ANYTHING into it. Any list of text items you can search through with a text query is fair game.

   git log --oneline | fzf

for example is one of my favorite tricks. Instead of scanning by eye or repeatedly grepping to find something, it's a live fuzzy filter. And depending on how deep you want to go you can then add key bindings to check out the selected commit, or preview the full message, or anything really.

And don't forget that your selection is printed to stdout:

    git log --oneline | fzf | cowsay

Sky's the limit.

Strictly speaking the ubuntu/debian docs do mention it, but yeah its not super discoverable: https://salsa.debian.org/go-team/packages/fzf/-/blob/master/...

The default install script asks if you want to install key bindings and adds that to your bashrc. How did you install fzf?

apt install? There's no way I'm integrating a core tool like that with a crude "curl | zsh" hack. How and when would it get updated? Am I expected to stick that in an Ansible playbook?

A shoutout to home-manager, where it's just programs.fzf.enableBashIntegration = true;

https://github.com/gantsign/ansible-role-oh-my-zsh

https://github.com/dotstrap/ansible-fzf

I don't see why not

Yes. It's a shell hook, it's expected for you to add it to your bash/zsh .rc yourself. How else can it work?

For an article titled "You've installed fzf. Now what?", I would've expected step 1 to be "how to add the shell hook for your particular shell". Especially since people here are referencing extra integrations that the bundled shell hook doesn't setup.

Packages can place init scripts into /etc/profile.d and those get autoloaded by shells.

This is what happens when tooling providers try to do their own packaging. Homebrew, apt, rpm, and other package managers, as well as bash, zsh and other shells, all offer standardized ways to install configuration loader scripts for the user's environment, and to display installer messages that prompt the user to do it - but fzf has a bunch of functionality to go around all that and auto-update itself in place and hack lines into the user's bashrc/zshrc.

Not trying to single out fzf here - there are many other tools that do this - but I find this behavior really sad because it makes me very disinclined to trust the tool with anything. A command-line tool should not be trying to auto-update itself or manipulate dotfiles in the user's home directory. It's dangerous and unexpected.

There’s no real good mechanism for what fzf is trying to do. profile.d might work, but I think that is more intended for environment variables, rather than interactive shell changing scripts.

There’s no standardised way to extend interactive shell configuration without just appending to /etc/bashrc.

The other problem with this is that it is hard to disable. What if you want fzf but without the key bindings? FZF could add a mechanism for this, but it doesn’t fully solve the problem, because the FZF script being added to global configuration will always be run before any user config.

In this specific case, it is a limitation of bash (and probably ZSH as well) that there is no simple package-manger compatible extension mechanism for interactive shell plugins which doesn’t sacrifice user control.

That is not where interactive shell confs should go, or it'll get loaded in non interactive contexts as well, which you usually don't want.

Not parent but on pop-os, using sudo apt install zfz I got the same behavior, had to add it myself to .bashrc

Pretty much par for the course, Linux distributions don't do per user configuration of tools beyond appending to PATH or setting some essential environment variables using scripts in in /etc/profile.d/. They will most certainly not mess with login scripts.

Yeah sure, that makes sense. I'm surprised that the .deb doesn't install the stuff from `$upstream/shell` into `/usr/share/fzf` though. That's the sort of thing `/usr/share/$prog` is intended for.

Then it would just be (in bash anyway):

   source /usr/share/fzf/keybindings.bash

In debian:

  source /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/completion.bash
  source /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/key-bindings.bash

This enables the C-r / M-c / C-t key bindings, but there's also a completion.bash file. This enables the "**" completion trigger, which can contextually complete paths, envvar names or PIDs in commands. (See "Fuzzy completion for bash and zsh" in fzf's readme [1]). Similarly, you can add to your .bashrc:

    if [ -e /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/completion.bash ]; then
      source /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/completion.bash
    fi

/usr/share/doc/fzf/README.Debian explains this, as well as the setup for zsh, fish and vim.

[1]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#fuzzy-completion-for-bash-an...

Thanks fore sharing. I was also lost reading this article, because I installed with apt (Debian). After searching for "fzf + Ctrl+R" I found about the keybindings part.

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