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Prior Art
[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 pluginβthank 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][unix philosophy]. 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][].
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 future contributors because it is more maintainable
- 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 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][autoloads] functions for faster shell startup
- easier to read, maintain, and contribute to
- better maintained