Fuzzy finding in vim - vim + fzf

FZF is the center-piece of my vim configuration. It is another excellent piece of software by Junegunn Choi.

fzf is a command line fuzzy finder.

Now, that doesn’t sound like much. But the way it can integrate with your other tools will blow your mind. The repository for FZF is located here and has extensive documentation on how to use it. Follow these instructions to install it.

To see how it works, run this command:

vim $(find . | fzf)

find . will list all the files in the directory recursively. You pipe that output into fzf. Fuzzy search for the file of your choice and press enter. fzf will output that filename and that is passed as an argument to vim. Pretty neat, huh? fzf also has a multiselect mode which can be activated with fzf -m. You can select multiple entries by pressing TAB.

fzf has a plugin interface for using it in vim. Before installing and jumping into it, we need to lay some groundwork.

RipGrep

RipGrep is a faster replacement for grep written in rust. Output of some ripgrep commands will be piped into fzf to get our desired setup. Now, go install ripgrep. The binary is called rg.

Vim leader key

Vim can map a sequence of keys to an action. Leader is just another key in that sequence. For example, map <leader>q :q<CR> will map the sequence <leader> + q to :q <enter>. The default leader key is \. You can change the value of leader with :mapleader. I find space to be the best key for leader. It is accessible with both fingers and it isn’t really doing anything else in the normal mode. So, go ahead and add this line in your vimrc.

let mapleader = "\<Space>"

Install fzf.vim

We saw how to install plugins using vim-plug in another post.

Add these 2 lines to your vimrc(Between plug#begin and plug#end).

Plug 'junegunn/fzf', { 'do': { -> fzf#install() } }
Plug 'junegunn/fzf.vim'

Now, let us setup some config and keybindings for useful commands.

" use ripgrep to search for files
let $FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND = 'rg -l ""'

map <C-p> :Files<CR>
map <C-b> :Buffers<CR>
map <Leader><Leader> :Commands<CR>
map <Leader>/ :execute 'Rg ' . input('Rg/')<CR>
map <Leader>l :BLines<CR>
map <Leader>gf :GF?<CR>

This will create the following mappings

You can find a list of commands here. See if anything tickles your fancy.

Searching for word under cursor

Something that I do pretty regularly is to search for the word under my cursor. This can be done by defining a vim function. I bind it to space G(That is an uppercase G).

command! -bang -nargs=* RgExact
  \ call fzf#vim#grep(
  \   'rg -F --column --line-number --no-heading --color=always --smart-case -- '.shellescape(<q-args>), 1,
  \   fzf#vim#with_preview(), <bang>0)

nmap <Leader>G :execute 'RgExact ' . expand('<cword>') <Cr>

Example