How I Use fzf.vim To Improve My Programming Workflow

Key Takeaways

what's going on everyone so I recently posted a video about FCF or fuzzy finder and I mentioned I was going to look into trying the vim plugin at the FM and oh my god it is awesome I can't believe I've been living without fzf in my life in the terminal as well as vim so let's take a look at what I got set up and how I'm using it so I got the two plugins FCF vim by june gun he is also the guy or gal whoever it is that has done go yo and limelight but I have and I believe also vim plug so I got a lot of plugins from this person probably almost as much as probably I think I have more plugins by this person than Tim Pope but you have to have these two lines that are on the repo that you wouldn't have added to your plug section and let's see how I've actually implemented this so for fuzzy finding I have mapped ctrl F to find so basically you know I want to find things ctrl F just like how you do in PDF if I was in them it would pull up all the files from the current directory I am in really useful I don't know how I've been living without this if I'm gonna get repo and I want to quickly jump to another file in the repo I don't maybe I don't want to open nerd tree and honestly that's you know kind of a lot of extra J&K button presses then just doing fuzzy finder with ctrl F start typing there's the entry and enter it can be faster now I've also mapped it so that if I'm in a file currently editing code or something and I mean insert mode and if I do ctrl F it'll actually search the lines of code and/or text that I are actually in the file itself and then if I'm in still in normal mode or actually I think I just have it mapped so pretty much any mode if I do ctrl G because this isn't really map this wasn't really mapped to anything particularly useful at least as far as I know do control G and we'll just give me like II kind of like how power line right here has a percentage of how far through the document you are it was just kind of telling me that but over here so I never used ctrl G for anything so I laughs a lot of these keys like I test their functionality before I map over them and they don't really do anything that was really important to me or it just wasn't using them so I didn't really care too much so I've started using these three maps in fuzzy fuzzy finder and it's the workflow is just awesome I can't believe I've been living without this not only in the terminal for my vim wiki shortcut with the custom function doing the preview for like my wiki notes but with this this is awesome so if I'm gonna be in say a git repo and this is like the repo for my website if I was going to open up a you know a blank document or something in this directory let's just do index just a random file now I'm in normal mode I just entered I can maneuver and I can go through the text whatever I'm in normal mode if I do ctrl F or how I think of it as find in normal mode it will actually open up fuzzy finder in this current directory I got 42 files in this get directory this is awesome so now I can easily just find out what is in this directory select it and look at it and none of this was set here by me so like I've the preview the syntax highlighting on this preview this is awesome I did not have to set any of these settings and this is actually already a very aesthetically pleasing output in FCF with in vim I really really enjoy this look so if I was gonna type something like blog there's my blog entries terminal there we go there's the entry I have on you know Neo mutt in the terminal based on just the word blog and then starting to type terminal enter there I am I'm in the file oh I don't want this one I want blog and let's do web there we go website BAM I'm easily in another file in another buffer perfect but what if I'm in a very long file now let's go to my I think it's the library page so ctrl F library there we go enter I'm in my library page and this thing is 107 lines long but let's say I want to search for a specific book or author so if I'm at the top of my document I'm going to insert mode I can do ctrl F again for find but this time I'm in insert mode ctrl F now I can search the actual contents of this file and I want to search for let's just say Wickham there we go Hadley Wickham a couple articles on this are a couple books I've read by Hadley Wickham I can go there enter there I'm at that line where Hadley Wickham was and then I can you know edit this document or whatever I wanted to do I really really like this workflow and now because this is in a git repository I can do ctrl G and I can actually look at the changes in this git repository so I can easily go through this and see the diff just grab the commit numbers and there's actually some helpful shortcuts down here that will tell you like what you can do with some you know key commands like if I want to revert back to a prior version of this page then this page I can actually see the entire git history of it and again none of this highlighting previewed none of this way I had to do all I did was add the plug-in that was it and I have all this great looking output that is also actually for me really functional really really enjoy this I can just escape to get out of it and it works just fine works great I really I just fiddled with this today and I just enjoy it so much now there was some other stuff I was going to talk about I've been watching more of Nyx casts videos and I was kind of scouring his vim RC from some of his old commits and there were some things like using tab remapped over the % to do matching like brackets like if I have a square bracket here and I want to quickly go over there I don't want to do like f4 find and go over to the square bracket or do a you know forward slash search I can just do tab and it pops me back I can start typing new things you know whatever and having back and forth for this now I'm actually going to look into doing COC n vim so that way I can get tax highlighting an autocomplete I did discover like in my VF and in let's do variant no I want to do la tech tech I should I need to go to our research directory and then alright so if I was going to be in a directory alright now in a file and I actually discovered the bite of my default vim has syntax are like autocomplete like if I did it was starting to type begin something I could do control X control L and it would actually give me some like syntax highlighting I could hold see this is its unwieldly I need to do actually COC or some better method because if I do control X control L it will give me this menu I can use the arrow keys to toggle through these and hit enter to actually complete it but I hear the workflow with the plugins is better than this and I want to be able to just do tab Auto completion and I've seen some of the stuff in that you complete me readme or yeah the readme on that on the repo and that looked a lot more friendly than this so I'm gonna look at COC nvm because I hear that's even better but I'm gonna play around with the auto completion plugins because that's that's like the next step for me I really want the auto completion and then also like the peek preview definitions of like different things so I'm gonna be working on that but I have this snip from NYX casts that I added recently where it simply will let you just take any of these like characters and treat it like you know if you're gonna do ciaw for change inner word will you do it for like CI double quotes or changing the contents of a double quote some of these things you know these characters are not mapped to you know part of the text objects now this is kind of hacky but it works and it works for what I'm gonna do so like say for instance I'm in markdown and I have syntax highlighting like underscore for italics star for bold you know whatever what-have-you if I wanted to easily change the text inside that formatting well it's going to delete all of it and I actually need to redo the formatting from scratch so let's actually do VF and then I'm gonna go to just some random thing hey alright so if I was gonna do like underscore or I'm sorry italic so let's say I wanted to go and actually change this word it's now between underscores now because I have the setting set it's actually gonna let me do CI underscore and that'll work but without that little snip it would actually change all of that text been treated as one single word object in removing the underscores when I still wanted my text to be italic so it's just one extra little step that actually helps retain formatting on things like markdown or other syntaxes that use these mapped characters that you want to change the inner contents of or capital T so that way you could easily just change all of it there was some other stuff I added from NYX casts as well oh yes the splits so now if I hold that if I press the C character and then do control hjkl it'll open up a split in that direction with using vim keys so if I was going to open up a new split to the right I would press C ctrl L oops do there so C ctrl L and it will actually open up a new split for me C ctrl H opens up another C ctrl J C ctrl K and I'll start open up these splits now to manage this splits better especially if I'm not saving any contents or if I open something I didn't edit it and I just want to close it I mapped ctrl Q to : q bang that way it just quits now if there's contents to be saved it won't let me just hard quit or it won't just save and quit because I want to actually control that but if it's something I haven't edited like a split like this a blank split I can just do ctrl and just close all these splits and it's much easier to manage now there is this little issue with the resizing of this and fix it right there going fullscreen cool so that is one other thing I added from next cast that I got is just the split management and I added these indent guides from indent line and I actually got some of these like cool characters so the deeper you go into the nested indents it actually creates more dashes and I think that's pretty cool this was messin with like the display of some of my links like if I was going to go through a link in my fin wiki you see how I can hover and it expands like this originally I wasn't seeing anything like I could hover over this and I would still only see like this text right here instead of even the braces so this was hiding a lot of the symbols I needed to edit for my formatting and kind of wrecking a little bit of havoc took a little bit of Stack Overflow searching to fix it but that is how I've been using FCF in my new workflow and in vim it's just fantastic I can't believe I've been living without this I can travel I can go back through my commit history see diffs I can search through the lines of code in my documents and just the general files whatever in whatever directory am in I think this is absolutely awesome yeah I highly highly recommend FCF for everything for vim for the terminal everything it's just fantastic so I want to be making probably more videos on how I mess with the vim in the future because now I got a mess with COC language servers autocomplete and peak definitions and for different code languages so that's why I'm gonna be messing with in the future but oh my gosh just massive level up with just the functionality of FCF I I love it I cannot believe I've been living without this so enjoy and definitely try it out let me know if you've found any really cool uses for it or if you found anything if you want to ever chat you can always just shoot me an email it's in my description for the YouTube channel or you could just join the slack channel links are ever in all below if you want to check those out peace out