fz performs a fuzzy prefix search against a line-delimited list of strings read from stdin.

I use this code as a way to experiment with approaches to fuzzy prefix searching. Although it works, there are other more battle-tested programs out there if you're looking for a real fuzzy search tool. The current search algorithm has exponential runtime, and will choke on really large inputs.

fz searches a list of strings, allowing arbitrary wildcard gaps between each character in the search term. Input strings that contain a portion of the search term are ranked by: 1) how many characters match the term, 2) the number of gaps in between matching characters, and 3) the length of the input string. It works similarly to the command palette in Sublime Text or VSCode.

# recursively search for file paths containing ".go"
$ find . | fz .go
./main.go
./main_test.go
./templates/index.gohtml
./go.mod

# search a list for the characters "p" and "l" anywhere in each string
$ echo 'people
	person
	place
	ply
	dog' | fz 'pl'
ply
place
people
person