I resisted fzf for ages on the grounds that I already knew how to use history and find, thank you. Then I installed it on a whim, ran the key-binding script, and within a week my muscle memory had quietly rewritten itself behind my back.
The one that did it was ctrl-r. Reverse history search in plain bash is a single-line peephole; you mistype the query and you're stuck pressing ctrl-r repeatedly hoping the right command scrolls past. With fzf bound to it you get a live, fuzzy, scrollable list of everything you've ever typed. I type three letters of a docker command from last month and it's there.
The other two earn their keep daily. ctrl-t drops a fuzzy file picker into the current command line, so I stopped typing long paths entirely. And cd **<tab> lets me jump anywhere in a deep tree without remembering the exact directory name. It pairs nicely with fd as the underlying source, which is faster and ignores .git by default.
None of this is clever. It's just that the friction of recalling things went away, and friction is the thing that quietly shapes how you work. I didn't decide to change my habits. fzf changed them for me, and I only noticed afterwards.