I use fzf in this very way and could have written this article if I weren’t lazy lol. However, I can add two other use cases:

1. I use i3wm at home (haven’t yet made the jump into Sway/Wayland), and don’t want to change my screen resolution by opening an app, clicking with my mouse, and then waiting. So I use fzf for quick resolution changes using xrandr:

  cr() {
    xrandr | sed -En “s/^[ ]+([0-9]{3,4}x[0-9]{3,4}0.\*/\1/p” | fzf | xargs -I{} xrandr —output HDMI-0 —mode {}
  }

2. At work I switch between multiple Kubernetes contexts during the day. To make the switch fast without typing a sentence, I will use this helper function:

  kc () {
     kubectl config get-contexts | tail -n +2 | fzf | cut -c 2- | awk ‘{print $1}’ | xargs kubectl config use-context
  }

I found this to be better than tab-completion because with tab completion I only get the name of the context, and not the cluster/user/namespace fields that make it easier to select the right one.

Use the above at your own risk, as they are fast hack-ups and could be far more clear (my sed skills are prone to error and overly verbose).

—Edited for HN formatting

Those are very creative use cases for fzf, I had never considered doing something like that.

My usage of it probably counts as quite basic. That said, I use it constantly. I just love the feeling of real time interaction it gives - it is well and truly part of my muscle memory now.

I use the vim plugin too, which is also brilliant and makes navigating larger projects very quick and easy. I use these two extra bindings all the time:

  nnoremap <silent> <C-Space> yiw:Rg <C-r>"<CR>
  vnoremap <silent> <C-Space> y:Rg <C-r>"<CR>

They're very simple, but when combined with the ability to add search items to the quickfix list it makes for a pretty powerful workflow.

The first one in particular gives a great approximation of symbol search that 'just works' anywhere.

Junegunn, the fzf author, makes great vim plugins too. Both the user experience and the developer experience (the code of these plugins) feel just right.

Fzf is better integrated in vim than in emacs. So I use dmenu on X/wofi on wayland instead, which are basically GUI fzf replacement.

I love fzf and tend to use it whenever repeatitive, non-static behavior is in play.

Replacing Ctrl-R with fzf is the most basic and most useful usage.

Basically every git command involving history, branches etc have fzf wrappers in my setup.

My latest, least common usage is having built a wrapper around KeepassX and keepassx-cli to access my secrets from the CLI with fzf to fuzzy search entries. Saves me a lot of time every day.

Thanks junegunn for theamazimg tool!

    export FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS='--reverse --border --exact --height=50%'
    export FZF_ALT_C_COMMAND='fd --type directory'
    export FZF_CTRL_T_COMMAND="mdfind -onlyin . -name ."

Alternatively, you can add fzf to the <TAB> menu and have it available anywhere that you have tab-completion: https://github.com/Aloxaf/fzf-tab

(I use this and it works great.)

I mostly use it to open files in vim [0]. The good thing about these aliases is that they keep the command in the shell history. So you open a file with the alias and it will leave a full 'vim path-to-file' in the history.

  # Open any file under current dir
  vf() {
    files="$(fzf --query="$1" --multi --select-1 --exit-0)"
    if test -n "$files"; then
        echo "${EDITOR:-vim} \"$files\""
        print -s "${EDITOR:-vim} \"$files\""
        ${EDITOR:-vim} "$files"
    fi
  }
  
  # Open from current modified files in git repository
  vfc() {
    files="$(git ls-files -m | fzf --multi --select-1 --exit-0)"
    if test -n "$files"; then
        echo "${EDITOR:-vim} \"$files\""
        print -s "${EDITOR:-vim} \"$files\""
        ${EDITOR:-vim} "$files"
    fi
  }

I also have a "create feature branch from JIRA issue" (it was in the list of ideas in this post I wrote for the engineering blog at work [1] about autocompleting EC2 instances, although I was already using it). The JIRA API is a bit too slow for fast response, so what I do is populate a text file via a cron job that requests from the API regularly, and use the text in the file for the completion.

    [1]: https://engineering.hybridtheory.com/aws/devops/2018/08/15/fzf-autocompletions/

If anyone is interested in a rust version (probably the main benefit being you can use it as a rust library) there is a similar tool called skim[1]

It's actively developed and seems to have a non-overlapping set of features with fzf other than the basics (they both have features the other doesn't, and skim copies most of the core ui from fzf)

[1] https://github.com/lotabout/skim