Autocompleting Files, Directories, Processes, and More with fzf

Navigating a more complex filesystem like a codebase can be challenging, even with tab completion. The fzf tool lets us navigate our filesystem, history, and even processes by searching for partial words. It’s a fuzzy finder for our shell.

Unfortunately, fzf isn’t available through Ubuntu’s package manager. To install fzf on Ubuntu, we grab its source code from GitHub and run an installer script. The easiest way to do this is to install Git on our Ubuntu machine and use it to clone the source code repository. Git isn’t covered in this course. We’re just going to use it to fetch the fzf program.

Setting up fzf

First, we use apt to install the git package:

$ sudo apt install git

Next, we use git to download fzf to the ~/.fzf directory:

$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.git ~/.fzf

When we use git clone, we download the current version of the files along with all previous versions. The --depth 1 option tells git to only grab the current version.

Now, we run the installer:

$ ~/.fzf/install

For your convenience, we’ve already installed fzf. Time to start using this tool.

Creating directories

First, let’s create a few directories.

$ mkdir -p files/{movies,music,photos,docs/{diagrams,markdown},code/{go,js,elm}}

Now, we use fzf to navigate to the files/code/elm directory:

$ `__fzf_cd__`

We type elm at the prompt, and the result shrinks. The path files/code/elm fills in. We press “Enter,” and the current working directory changes.