Earlier this week, Dwight joined the Forem team. we paired on scoping a problem.
While Dwight drove, I helped navigate. As he was typing in his terminal, I noticed an interesting feature. With a blank input prompt a drop-down appearred and he’d select a command from history.
By default, when I typed Ctrl+r I got history-incremental-search-backward. Which was a rather simple prompt for clumsily searching past commands. What I saw in Dwight’s terminal was something far more robust. When he typed Ctrl+r, he got a list of past commands and could type to filter towards those commands.
I asked about the configuration, and Dwight told me it was a plugin.
New to Me Tools
After our pairing session, I went looking.
First, I stumbled into hstr, a command to easily view, navigate and search command history with shell history suggest box for bash and zsh.
I installed it and configured that plugin.
This set me on the path for further exploration. I then found fzf, a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder.
I started exploring that, and the extensive community wiki entries that leverage fzf.
I added to my terminal functions:
- fkill, a fuzzy search of processes to kill.
- fe, a fuzzy file finder that opens the selected file(s) in my editor.
- rfv, a two stage file name and content finder.
I also replaced the recently installed hstr with fzf’s fzf-history-widget
And while reading through the wiki, I found forgit, a Utility tool for using git interactively. Powered by junegunn/fzf.
I favor Emacs 📖’s amazing magit package for most git interactions. But forgit’s interactive log viewer provides functionality that I haven’t found in Magit 📖.
Wrapping Up
If you often interact with git via the command-line, I encourage you to look into forgit. It provides userful interactive additions to your git repertoire.
These three tools—hstr, fzf, and forgit—are all fantastic command-line additions. While I tend to spend more of my time in Emacs than on the command-line, I do find myself in the command-line doing some tasks. These commands, in particular fogit::log (and it’s alias glo) are useful tools for my toolkit.
I also spent some time reading through the archaic output of my bindkey output. I learned that Ctrl+x then Ctrl+e would open a new buffer for my configured editor with the current command line’s prompt’s content as the buffer’s content.
All of this learning and exploring came about because I paired with a developer and was curious about how they navigated their toolbox.