Command Line – fzf

Search commands have always been essential to using computers. With the increased storage capacity of modern systems, they are more important than ever because there is more material to search. In fact, searches are so important that alternatives to time-honored commands are becoming increasingly common. One of the most effective of these recent alternatives is fzf, a command-line "fuzzy finder" [1].

For most Linux users, the basic search tool for finding directories and files has been find, which is most effective when you know exactly what you are looking for. If you do not know, then you need a way to allow variation in the output. Traditionally, variation in search tools like find is provided by regular expressions (regexes), a concept first developed in the 1950s. Regexes are standard patterns that offer different types of variations in results. Most users are familiar with the simpler regexes, such as * to mean zero or any character, so that apt* might return apt, apt-get, apt-cache, and probably many others. At a more advanced level, users might know that gray|grey produces results with either spelling, or [b-e] a range of characters. However, regexes are not consistent across applications and can rapidly become extremely complex to construct or type correctly, especially when all you want is a quick answer. For example, even with context, who can easily explain this randomly selected example:

(\W|^)[\w.\-]{0,25}@(yahoo|hotmail|gmail)\.com(\W|$)

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