Prior Art

Jethrokuan/fzf

jethrokuan/fzf is another fzf plugin that provides similar features and is prevalent in the fish community (470+ stargazers and 30 contributors, including me). In fact, I referenced it when creating this plugin—thank you Jethro!

So why another fzf plugin? While contributing to jethrokuan/fzf, I was discouraged by the complexity and inefficiency of the code that resulted from feature cruft (e.g. it provides multiple overlapping ways to action on files: find, cd, and open) and poor design decisions (e.g. Tmux support was implemented using a variable command). Moreover, Jethro has lost interest in his plugin (he later confirmed to me that he stopped using fish). Wanting a sharper tool and to give back to the community, I decided to write my own plugin.

After much work, fzf.fish now implements most of the same features but is faster, easier to maintain, and more Unix-y. I also added new features: using fzf to search git status, git log, and shell variables. However, I chose not to implement Tmux support, because users can easily add support externally themselves; and tab completion, because even jethrokuan/fzf's implementation of it is buggy as evidenced by the many issues reported about it. Additionally, I invested a lot into documentation explaining every non-obvious bit of code and even set up continuous integration, making fzf.fish much easier to contribute to

TLDR: choose fzf.fish over jethrokuan/fzf if you want

• faster, more efficient, code
• code that is easier to debug if you encounter issues
• a tool built on Unix philosophy
• a plugin that is more likely to attract contributors because it is more maintainable and has CI
• a plugin that will be more frequently updated by its author (Jethro no longer uses fish)
• features for searching git status, git log, and shell variables

and you don't mind

• having to integrate fzf with Tmux yourself, which is easy to do
• not having buggy fzf tab completion

Fzf's out-of-the-box Fish extension

Fzf optionally comes with its own Fish extension. It is substantial but fzf.fish has these advantages over it:

• features for searching git status, git log, and shell variables
• timestamps when searching command history
• colorized results when searching for files
• previews when searching for files
• configurable key bindings
• autoloaded functions for faster shell startup
• easier to read, maintain, and contribute to
• better maintained