jessestuart / fzf-z

Plugin for zsh to integrate fzf and zsh's z plugin - enables easy switching between recent dirs in zsh

fzf-z

This plugin was originally inspired as a mashup between fzf, and oh-my-zsh's z plugin, which allows you to track recently and commonly used directories. The z plugin does a great job of allowing you to switch between frequently-used directories just by typing z *somedirectorysubstring*, but it doesn't really easily allow you to browse those directories, with partial-string search. This plugin was invented to solve that problem.

Since then, I've extended it to support two other sources of information about the directories you might be interested in, which are all mixed into the same list delivered through fzf. In priority order (the order in which they are shown in fzf, first to last):

1. Directories under the current directory. The number of these shown in fzf is limited by the FZFZ_SUBDIR_LIMIT environment variable, which defaults to 50. If you don't want those to be shown, simply set this to 0.

2. Recently used dirs, as provided by the z command from the z plugin (the original purpose of this plugin). The order shown is the order given by z -l.

3. All subdirectories in all directories listed in the FZFZ_EXTRA_DIRS environment variables. These directories are space-separated, so for example:

   export FZFZ_EXTRA_DIRS="~/MyDocuments '~/Desktop/Some Other Stuff'"

To use the plugin, simply hit <CTRL-g> anywhere on an empty zsh command-line, and it will bring up a list of directories according to the three categories above (mixed together). Select one, perhaps typing to filter the list, and hit Enter - you'll change to that directory (assuming you have the AUTO_CD zsh option turned on, which is recommended). This is similar to the default Ctrl-T binding already provided by the fzf zsh key-bindings file. At the moment, this plugin doesn't allow the Ctrl-G keybinding to be customized, but you can change by simply forking the plugin and editing the file if you want.

Installation

You must have the z plugin installed as a pre-req. You must also have fzf installed. Both must be in your $PATH.

Treat this plugin like any other zsh plugin. For example:

Antigen

If you're using Antigen:

1. Add antigen bundle andrewferrier/fzf-z to your .zshrc where you've listed your other plugins.
2. Close and reopen your Terminal/iTerm window to refresh context and use the plugin. Alternatively, you can run antigen bundle andrewferrier/fzf-z in a running shell to have antigen load the new plugin.

zgen

If you're using zgen:

1. Add zgen load andrewferrier/fzf-z to your .zshrc along with your other zgen load commands.
2. rm ${ZGEN_INIT}/init.zsh && zgen save

Customizing

If you set the FZFZ_EXCLUDE_PATTERN environment variable to a regex (matched with egrep) it will exclude any directory which matches it from appearing in the subdirectory results (it isn't applied to the z results, since it's assumed any directory you've navigated to before is one you might be interested in). By default this variable is set to filter out anything in a .git directory.

You can also set FZFZ_EXTRA_OPTS to add any additional options you like to the fzf command - for example, -e will turn exact matching on by default.

By default, fzf-z will filter out duplicates between its different mechanisms of finding file paths; however, this does slow it down. If you don't care about that and want to speed it up, set FZFZ_UNIQUIFIER="cat".

Performance

If it's installed and in your PATH, fzf-z will use fd. If not, it'll fall back to find, which is slower. The behaviour is slightly differently also; fd will exclude files ignored by .gitignore or similar, which find will not do, so you will get less results. Generally, this is what you want, though.