Augment your Fish command line with mnemonic key bindings to efficiently find what you need using fzf.

Use fzf.fish to interactively find and insert different shell entities into the command line:

• Search input: recursive listing of current directory's non-hidden files
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+Alt+F (F for file)
• Preview window: file with syntax highlighting, directory contents, or file type
• Remarks
  • appends / if the selection is a directory and the only path selected so you can hit ENTER to immediately cd into it
  • if the current token is a directory with a trailing slash (e.g. .config/<CURSOR>), then that directory is searched instead
  • ignores files that are also ignored by git
  • Tab to multi-select

• Search input: the current repository's git status
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+Alt+S (S for status)
• Remarks: Tab to multi-select

• Search input: the current repository's formatted git log
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+Alt+L (L for log)
• Preview window: commit message and diff

• Search input: Fish's command history
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+R (R for reverse-i-search)
• Preview window: the entire command with Fish syntax highlighting

• Search input: all the variable names of the environment currently in scope
• Key binding and mnemonic: Ctrl+V (V for variable)
• Preview window: the scope info and values of the variable
• Remarks
  • $history is excluded for technical reasons so use the search command history feature instead to inspect it

The prompt used in the screencasts was created using IlanCosman/tide.

First, install a proper version of these CLI dependencies:

The search directory feature uses fd and bat to list and preview files. If you don't plan on using search directory, then you don't need to install them.

Next, install this plugin with Fisher.

fzf.fish can be installed manually or with other plugin managers but only Fisher is officially supported.

fisher install PatrickF1/fzf.fish

fzf.fish includes a convenient wrapper for configuring its key bindings. It comes with command completions and is thoroughly documented. See

fzf_configure_bindings --help

Once you've found the fzf_configure_bindings command that produces the desired bindings, add it to your config.fish in order to persist the bindings.

fzf supports setting default options via the FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS environment variable. If it is set, fzf implicitly prepends it to the options passed to it on every execution, scripted and interactive.

By default, fzf.fish will set a sane FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS every time before it executes fzf. However, if you export your own FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS variable, then fzf.fish will forgo setting it and yours will be used instead. See functions/_fzf_wrapper.fish for more details.

The following variables can store custom options that will be passed to fzf by their respective feature:

They are always appended last to fzf's argument list. Because fzf uses the option appearing last when options conflict, your custom options can override hardcoded options. Custom fzf options unlocks a variety of possibilities in customizing and augmenting each feature such as:

• add key bindings within fzf to operate on the selected line:
  • open file in Vim
  • preview image files
  • copy to clipboard
  • git checkout commit
  • git reset file
• adjust the preview command or window
• re-populate fzf's input list on demand
• change the search mode

The search directory feature, by default, uses bat to preview the contents of files. bat is a well-adopted cat replacement with syntax highlighting, line numbers, and more. If you would like to change the preview tool (to cat to avoid installing a new dependency, or to add custom logic such as binary or image preview), you may set the fzf_preview_file_cmd variable. For example, in your config.fish, you may put:

set fzf_preview_file_cmd cat

Do not specify a target path in the command, as fzf.fish will prepend the file to preview to the command itself.

The search directory feature, by default, uses ls to preview the contents of directories. To integrate with the variety of ls replacements available (e.g. exa, lsd, tree), the command used to preview directories is configurable through the fzf_preview_dir_cmd variable. Set fzf_preview_dir_cmd in your config.fish:

set fzf_preview_dir_cmd exa --all --color=always

As above, do not specify a target path in the command. fzf.fish will prepend the directory to preview to the command itself.

To pass custom options to fd when it is executed to populate the list of files for the search directory feature, set the fzf_fd_opts variable. For example, to include hidden files but not .git, put this in your config.fish:

set fzf_fd_opts --hidden --exclude=.git

Find answers to these questions and more in the project Wiki:

• How does fzf.fish compare to other popular fzf plugins for Fish?
• Why isn't this feature working for me?
• How can I customize this feature?
• How can I contribute to this plugin?