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Comment by jez

4 years ago

This is why fzf is so great in my mind. The longer a file path is, the better chance I have of finding it later (whereas deeply nested file paths make it harder to find files using something like Finder or ls)

These days I hardly ever bring up file naming in code reviews—fzf just makes it so easy to find everything.

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Yep, real time fuzzy finding makes it so easy to find stuff quickly.

You can hit CTRL+t from the terminal after installing FZF and it will let you fuzzy search for any file you have. So you can do something like run `vim [CTRL+t]` to quickly find and open any file you want, or `cd [CTRL+t]` to switch into some deeply nested directory.

Even inside of WSL 2 with a 6 year old workstation on a first generation SSD it takes ~3 seconds to index 190,000 files and once that index is built, narrowing down results while typing is close to instant when using ripgrep as FZF's search back-end.

The amazing thing about all of this is it's dynamic. There's no having to create aliases or pre-defined directory structures. I only discovered CTRL+t from FZF a few weeks ago but once I did it was almost as good as discovering CTRL+r for the first time.

Protip for people that spend a lot of time on Github: press the letter "t" when browsing a project to fuzzy find on filenames like fzf in Github.