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How to search faster in Vim with FZF.vim

Igor Irianto on June 30, 2020

Follow @learnvim for more Vim tips and tricks! One thing that modern text editors/ IDEs got right that Vim didn't is how easy it is to find files ...

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Corey Alexander • Jul 5 '20

Great article! I've been a fzf devotee for a while, but I really like how you laid out the syntax for it in a easy reference way! Will likely refer back to it for that in the future!

Shameless Plug:
Check out my fork of fzf.vim that adds devicons for file types to the fzf results!
fzf.devicon.vim

Sami Korpela • Jul 4 '20

I have used FZF and l’m loving it. Instead of ripgrep I use fd

I have just started my Vim journey few months ago, so I’m really liking your articles 🙂

Igor Irianto • Jul 5 '20

Interesting. I actually never heard of fd before. Just checked fd GH repo - thanks for the mention!

David • Jul 5 '20

I believe thatfd and rg (ripgrep) are very different utilities, Sami. fd is more of a find substitute and rg is a substitute for grep or ag (The Silver Searcher). I've had no need to install fd using fzf. Check out videos from The Primeagen and Thoughtbot on Vim. Cheers and enjoy the journey!

Sami Korpela • Jul 5 '20 • Edited

Yes, that is true. I just use it with the FZF for finding files as it is faster than find (or at least it feels so).

But I might add ripgrep to get faster grep, haven’t yet used used it so much.

And the ripgrep author suggests to use fd instead when finding files.
Source

David • Jul 5 '20

Nice write-up, Igor. I'd been using fzf for a couple years in Vim, but it was only recently (beginning of the year) that I discovered its powers as a CLI utility. If you're using bash along with fzf's bash/zsh-completion, it provides globbed search that you can prefix with many Unix utilities including ripgrep:

open file in vim that is somewhere from current working dir: $ vim ** (followed by tab)
open file in vim anchoring from a directory: $ vim foo/bar/** (followed by tab)
search all files in current working directory (with ripgrep): $ rg --files | fzf
change to a project directory (can't remember where): $ cd ** (followed by tab)

You're probably familiar with these as one of your links discusses fzf and ripgrep.

I just learned how to better to search/find-and-replace in multiple files from you. Thanks for that! I was just about to adopt more sed into my workflow to do this sort of thing, but the situation hasn't come up yet

Richard Melkonian • Mar 16 '22

when I use add this to my .vimrc
if type rg &> /dev/null; then
export FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND='rg --files'
export FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS='-m --height 50% --border'
fi
I get errors when reloading vimrc. Anything I'm missing?

Wesley Cheek • May 30 '22

This needs to be added to your .bashrc or .zshrc, not your .vimrc!

Ahmad Solehudin Romdoni • Sep 8 '22

Hi Wesley Cheek, how about fish shell? i got the error also

Igor Irianto • Jul 1 '20

Lol good suggestion. Edited the post.

Corey Alexander • Jul 5 '20

This gave me a chuckle when I read it at first lol Love that it came from the comment thread!

redeemefy • Oct 12 '20

How do you go by ignoring directories such as node_modules or .github

Felix Wolfsteller • Feb 28 '23

if you use :GFiles instead of :Files it will ignore everything that is in .gitignore. That should solve the cases you mentioned, although it does not provide a general answer.

Daniel Tompkins • Dec 5 '20

Awesome intro to fzf. Thanks for the help getting everything setup. Haven't familiarized myself with these tools before, but I can definitely see the use-value!