FZF
Rapid fuzzy finder
Shashank Sharma isn’t one for magic, but he’s not averse to using the Accio spell or its computing incarnation, fuzzy finder, to find things quickly.
Credit: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s always on the hunt for affordable geeky memorabilia.
When looking for files on the desktop, you may often rely on the search feature of your favourite file manager. The conventional searching approach is to apply an exact search, so that only files or directory that are a perfect match to the search string are displayed. A fuzzy search, on the other hand, performs an approximate search, and instead of identifying exact matches, displays matching results with each keystroke.
The fzf utility identifies itself as a general-purpose fuzzy finder. Released under the MIT License, the crossplatform tools can be used across all flavours of Linux.
Installing fzf
Despite the usefulness of the tool, the project isn’t offered as part of the default installation of desktop Linux distributions. However, it’s available in the software repositories of quite a few. The project’s GitHub page provides a list of all the distributions that carry fzf in their software repositories, along with the supported version. Unfortunately, the latest release, version 0.29.0, is offered only in the latest releases of distributions such as Fedora. Manjaro, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu, Debian and Arch, while most others carry older versions.