Ramblings of an aging IT geek
← Ramblings of an aging IT geek
tooling

the day fzf quietly rewired my terminal habits

How a single fuzzy finder bound to a couple of keys replaced most of my history-grepping and cd-spelunking at the shell.

A mechanical keyboard lit beside a terminal window

I resisted fzf for ages on the grounds that I already knew where everything was. Reverse-search did me fine, cd and tab-completion did me fine, and I distrust tools that promise to fix habits I did not think were broken.

Then I let the shell integration set its key bindings and within a week I could not work without them. Ctrl-R no longer drops me into the cramped readline reverse-search where you fish for one command at a time. It opens the whole history as a fuzzy list I can skim. Ctrl-T pastes a file path from a fuzzy walk of the tree, so I stop typing ls, squinting, then typing half the name. And **<tab> after almost any command expands into a picker.

The thing that actually changed is smaller than the feature list suggests. I stopped trying to remember exact strings. I used to keep a mental catalogue of the precise incantation for some kubectl or ssh command, and I would type it from memory, badly. Now I type two distinctive letters from anywhere in the line and let the finder do the recall. The terminal went from a place I had to be accurate to a place I can be approximate, and approximate is how my brain actually works.

That is the whole post. Bind the keys, suffer the week, never look back.