sebastiancarlos

Either self-hosted or cloud, I assume many of you keep a server around for personal things. And I'm curious about the cool stuff you've got running on your personal servers.

What services do you host? Any unique stuff? Do you interact with it through ssh, termux, web server?

Hey,

As an avid CLI user, I always aimed to master non-interactive tools to perform most of my work, given that they are easy to use, create, extend, and connect.

However, I found myself dealing with software projects with many files (mostly under the yoke of corporate oppression; an ordeal which I endure to sustain myself, as most of those reading me do, and therefore I will not go further into this topic) and started to hit the limits of non-interactive tools to find and edit files. Indeed, I could go faster if I followed the temptation of monstrous IDEs, as I did in my innocent past.

I did not despair, as naturally I heard of the usefulness of interactive fuzzy finders such as fzf. After spending an afternoon evaluating the tool, I concluded that it indeed increases the complexity of my workflow. Still, this complexity is managed in a sensible way that follows the UNIX tradition.

I now ask you two general questions:

• Did you reach similar conclusions to me and decide to use interactive fuzzy finders to solve working on software projects with many files?
• If you use fzf or similar tools, what can you tell me about your workflow? Any other third-party tools? Do you integrate it into your scripts? Any advice that you can give me out of a long time of experience using the tool that is not easily conveyed by the documentation?

I also ask this very specific question:

• The one part of fzf which I found missing was a way to interact with the results of grep, and to automatically place the selected file(s) in the prompt or an editor. For that, I created the following two commands. Do you have a similar workflow when you want to bring the speed of fuzzy finding to grep?

#! /usr/bin/env bash

# gf: grep + fzf
# basically a wrapper for 'grep <ARGS> | fzf | cut -f 1 -d:'

# print usage on -h/--help
if [[ "$1" == "-h" || "$1" == "--help" ]]; then
    echo "Usage: gf <grep-args>"
    echo
    echo "~~~ that feel when no 'gf' ~~~"
    echo
    echo "- Basically a wrapper for 'grep <ARGS> | fzf | cut -f 1 -d:'"
    echo "- Opens fzf with grep results, and prints the selected filename(s)"
    echo "- Note: As this is meant to search files, it already adds the -r flag"
    echo
    echo "Example:"
    echo "  $ nvim \`gf foobar\`"
    echo "  $ gf foobar | xargs nvim"
    exit 0
fi

# run grep with arguments, pipe to fzf, and print the filename(s) selected
custom_grep () {
    grep -E --color=always --binary-files=without-match --recursive "$@"
}
remove_color () {
    sed -E 's/\x1b\[[0-9;]*[mK]//g'
}
custom_fzf () {
    fzf --ansi --height ~98%
}
grep_output=$(custom_grep "$@")
if [[ "$?" -ne 0 ]]; then
    exit 1
else
    echo "$grep_output" | custom_fzf | remove_color | cut -f 1 -d:
fi

#! /usr/bin/env bash

# ge: grep + fzf + editor
# basically a wrapper for 'grep <ARGS> | fzf | cut -f 1 -d: | $EDITOR'

# print usage on -h/--help
if [[ "$1" == "-h" || "$1" == "--help" ]]; then
    echo "Usage: ge <grep-args>"
    echo
    echo "- Basically a wrapper for 'grep <ARGS> | fzf | cut -f 1 -d: | \$EDITOR'"
    echo "- Opens fzf with grep results, and edits the selected file(s)"
    echo "- Note: As this is meant to search files, it already adds the -r flag"
    echo "- Note: Internally, it uses the 'gf' command"
    echo
    echo "Example:"
    echo "  $ ge foobar"
    exit 0
fi

# takes output from 'gf' and opens it in $EDITOR
grep_fzf_output=$(gf "$@")
if [[ -n "$grep_fzf_output" ]]; then
  $EDITOR "$grep_fzf_output"
fi

Have a wonderful day, you CLI cowboys.