Tiebreak options do not suffice with nth

[xeruf]

• I have read through the manual page (man fzf)
• I have the latest version of fzf
• I have searched through the existing issues

Info

• OS
  • Linux
  • Mac OS X
  • Windows
  • Etc.
• Shell
  • bash
  • zsh
  • fish

Problem / Steps to reproduce

I have a nice fzf script to search through and install Arch Linux packages.
In it, I use --nth so I can see the repo but only search the actual package string.
However, I am unable to define any tiebreak algorithm that puts the best matches first.

Suppose the following scenario:

echo "aur\tdockerize\naur\tsystemd-docker\ncommunity\tdocker\t5.5" | fzf --nth 2

Searching for docker will yield one of the aur packages,
regardless of the tiebreak options.

In my day-to-day usage I encounter basically this,
except that there's lots more irrelevant results.

Workarounds

• search for ^docker$
• reorder the input so community packages appear first (pretty brittle)

Neither of these is reliable and convenient.
I think the solution would be a --tiebreak=matchlength option, which only takes the length of the match rather than the whole line into account.
And, again, sorting perfect matches first (#2285)

[0phoff]

I encountered exactly the same issue!

I assumed that --tiebreak=length would already take into account the substring we select with the --nth selector.
Wouldn't this be a possibility as well, to have the length tiebreak work on the --nth substring automatically, as I do not think there wouldn't really be a use-case where you want the total line length, instead of the matching line length.

[xeruf]

Just encountered a similar issue again, as I use --tiebreak=index now to sort non-AUR packages always first.

But in this example, the perfect match "context" if very far behind, making me wonder why the algorithm resorted to a tiebreak here at all - you don't need a tiebreak to see that the first match is a lot worse, even with a very generic algorithm. Do we maybe have a regression here?

[junegunn]

You might want to try the new --tiebreak=chunk in 0.32.0. It was designed to work well with or without --nth.