This is a fork of popular command-line fuzzy finder fzf which implements so-called abbreviation (or acronym) fuzzy matching.

Unlike "normal" fuzzy matching, this method allows pattern letters to match not at any position of searched text but only at word beginnings. In other words search query must constitute a valid abbreviation (or acronym) for the some words from searched text.

For example, foo bar will be matched by fb or fob but not by fr or far.

Please see README of my other project vim-abbrev-matcher for expanded reasoning and benefits of such approach. In short, this type of search filters candidates much better and faster than normal fuzzy search which is beneficial in some use cases, such as:

• When searching command-line histories you might prefer to turn sorting off in order to see filtered candidates in original (chronological) order. In this case abbreviation matching narrows candidates much faster.
• Fuzzy searchers often provide some sorting heuristic which scores each match and tries to give you "best" matches first. This heuristic may fail for your specific use case and give you a large number of unrelated results. Abbreviation matching also uses such heuristic but it also produces much less results so there is more chance the needed element will be contained in displayed results even when having a bad score.

Installation

go get github.com/sergei-dyshel/fzf-abbrev

Usage

fzf-abbrev may be used as drop-in replacement for fzf. In that case just copy compiled binary over ~/.fzf/bin/fzf). In order to get "normal" fuzzy matching, start your query with #.

There is one new command-line option --abbrev which is comma-separated list of options that control new matcher's behavior:

• no-default brings back normal fuzzy matching as default behavior, so fzf-abbrev --abbrev=no-default works the same way as original fzf.
• fast makes matching faster but resulted scoring may not be optimal. Use this option when candidate sorting is off (i.e. for filtering histories).
• file-paths optimizes scoring heuristic to match file paths. In this case it will prefer matching file names over matching file directories.

Scoring

Basically similar to vim-abbrev-matcher. The weights are slightly different though.

Development status

This is work in progress but current version is already pretty stable and usable.