Using FZF to Preview Text Files on the Command Line and within Vim
Here's a video going over how to set up a Shell alias to preview files. It also works out of the box with Vim using the fzf.vim plugin.
Quick Jump: Demo
FZF is extremely useful on the command line to reverse search your history with CTRL+r. I’ve made a video about that a few years ago, but FZF can also fuzzy find files using CTRL+t.
You can take this one step further to have FZF recursively find all files in a directory and then you can quickly preview them with paging support . You can also set up an alias to make it easy to access and even get syntax highlighting if you use the bat tool.
Demo
Alias
alias pf="fzf --preview='less {}' --bind shift-up:preview-page-up,shift-down:preview-page-down"
Timestamps
- 0:08 – I’ve made videos in the past about reverse searching your history with FZF
- 0:18 – Running the FZF command on its own
- 0:37 – Using the built in CTRL+t bind with FZF to fuzzy search files on the command line
- 0:57 – Previewing files on the command line with FZF using less
- 1:59 – Using different commands to preview files, such as head for the first 30 lines
- 2:24 – Using bat to get syntax highlighting in your previewed files
- 4:06 – Creating custom FZF binds to page through results and setting up a Shell alias
- 5:59 – You can preview files with the FZF Vim plugin by default too
- 7:08 – Recap and any questions?
Reference Links
- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/fuzzy-search-your-bash-history-in-style-with-fzf
- https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
- https://changelog.com/podcast/451
- https://github.com/sharkdp/bat
- pf alias in my dotfiles
- https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.vim
What types of files are you going to preview using this method? Let me know below.