✏️ Cover art by Michael Rayback on Dribble

Git is an essential and powerful tool for any software developer. As part of your developer workflow, you might find yourself juggling between different projects and features all the time.

Given so, it's very hard to keep track of all the names of the branches between projects, especially when coming back to it after some time. So one common cumbersome procedure is looking up the name of the branch you want to get on that specific project and git checkout to it.

To achieve so, you first need to get all the branch names of the current project. Fortunately for us, git has a command for this, for-each-ref. What it does is iterate over all the references, which is a readable name that points to the SHA-1 ids of git artifacts (e.g commits), given a pattern. For example, getting refs/heads returns a list of all the references of the head commits for each branch.

You can iterate on these references to print all the branches on the terminal by using the following command:

git for-each-ref --sort='authordate:iso8601' --format='%(authordate:relative)%09%(refname:short)' refs/heads

Of course, you can format and sort the results however you like. The next step would be to be able to interact with that list of branches, like selecting one, copying one, searching, and/or filtering the results.

A pretty useful command for that is the well-known grep, which allows us to find patterns in the results. For example, we could chain the output of the branches command to grep pattern to search for branches that match the pattern.

I want to only see the branches which are prefixed with fix because I want to come back to fix that pesky bug? no problem, git branches | grep fix would do the filtering (pst, adding an alias to the branches command is pretty useful). Then you can copy the branch name and check out to it

... But what if we want to interactively filter the branches and navigate through them, as well as binding keyboard commands to actions? (to, for example, check out to a branch using enter!)... you can easily do that with Fzf.

Introducing Fzf

Fzf is a grep on steroids. According to the description, it is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder.

junegunn / fzf

🌸 A command-line fuzzy finder

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Warp is a modern, Rust-based terminal with AI built in so you and your team can build great software, faster.

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fzf is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder.

It's an interactive filter program for any kind of list; files, command history, processes, hostnames, bookmarks, git commits, etc. It implements a "fuzzy" matching algorithm, so you can quickly type in patterns with omitted characters and still get the results you want.

Highlights

• 📦 Portable — Distributed as a single binary for easy installation
• ⚡ Blazingly fast — Highly optimized code instantly processes millions of items
• 🛠️ Extremely versatile — Fully customizable via an event-action binding mechanism
• 🔋 Batteries included — Includes integration with bash, zsh, fish, Vim, and Neovim

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I would like to thank all the sponsors of this project who make it possible for me to continue to improve fzf.

If…

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Fzf grabs the output of any command, being it a list, processes, text... and lets you search and filter these results interactively and navigate through them. You can also assign key bindings to commands on your search.

With it, we can search and navigate through any directory easily and look for files, also adding some key bindings e.g opening the file in vscode when clicking enter and copying the filename path with tab.

ls | fzf --preview 'bat --style=numbers --color=always {}' --bind 'enter:execute(code {}),tab:execute-silent(echo {} | pbcopy)+abort' | head -100

The above example uses bat instead of cat for previewing files, as it includes some nice features like syntax highlighting and also shows modifications on files by integrating with git.

sharkdp / bat

A cat(1) clone with wings.

A cat(1) clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration

Key Features • How To Use • Installation • Customization • Project goals, alternatives
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Syntax highlighting

bat supports syntax highlighting for a large number of programming and markup languages:

Git integration

bat communicates with git to show modifications with respect to the index (see left side bar):

Show non-printable characters

You can use the -A/…

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Creating the interactive branch navigator with Fzf

With the fzf command in place, we can pipe our git branches command [Fig. 1] to the fzf part of [Fig. 2] with some tweaking of the key bindings, and that will allow us to filter, copy and check out branches, just like that:

git for-each-ref --sort='authordate:iso8601' --format='%(authordate:relative)%09%(refname:short)' refs/heads | fzf --tac --bind 'enter:execute(echo {} | rev | cut -f1 | rev | xargs git checkout)+abort,tab:execute-silent(echo {} | rev | cut -f1 | rev | pbcopy)+abort'

You can then bind the command to some git alias in ~/.gitconfig, I have it assigned to git brs.

Fzf includes numerous built-in key bindings as exiting with escape or navigating with scrolling/arrows, to name a couple. Try extending the command by adding more key bindings that fit your workflow!

Here's a short example of the command in action:

That's it! ✨

And you, what other amazing fzf commands do you use, or would you create to improve your development workflow?