The Valuable Dev - A Practical Guide to fzf: Building a File Explorer

Saturday Greetings, Valuable Developer

For those who celebrated it not so long ago: happy new year! Hope everything’s going well on your side.

The article of this month is about one of my favorite CLI, fzf. It’s insane what we can do with it, that’s why I thought writing a dedicated article could be useful for you. I cover many things related to the CLI itself, but not to its possible integrations (to your favorite shell, or to Vim for example); if you want me to write about that, don’t hesitate to hit this reply button to let me know!

A Practical Guide to fzf: Building a File Explorer

Many CLIs are general enough to be powerful in many situations; the fuzzy finder fzf is a good example. Fast, highly customizable, it answers many needs a developer can have.

Update

• In case you’re curious, here are my last year’s achievements:
  • I wrote 11 articles for The Valuable Dev (258H / 621 pomodoros)
  • I wrote for my next book Learning to Play Vim (162H / 388 pomodoros).
  • I made some YouTube videos (33H / 80 pomodoros).
  • I wrote for my digital garden (12H / 30 pomodoros)
  • I sold 177 digital books Building Your Mouseless Development Environment and 87 physical ones.
• I plan this year to spend a good chunk of my free time to write Learning to Play Vim - I hope I’ll be able to publish it in the middle of the year.

Resources

• An interesting article about a writer and data engineer learning Vim in 2023.
• A small but interesting article about solving a problem with a simple Go server and a bash script.

Mouseless

• If you want to record your terminal in a GIF, the CLI vhs is perfect for that. As a bonus, here’s also a good article about GIF optimization.
• What about using Duck Duck Go directly in your terminal? The CLI ddgr answers this need.
• The CLI nap gives us a TUI to manage code snippets directly in the terminal.
• Useless so invaluable: a CLI to simulate a lava lamp in the shell.

Book

Here are a couple of books about complexity and randomness I find interesting:

• Complexity - A Guided Tour
• The Black Swan
• Introduction to complexity

Let’s Connect!

If you want more information about the content of this newsletter, or if you have any question, don’t hesitate to reply to this email! I’m always happy to answer back.

Similarly, if you think this newsletter is boring, if you didn’t like my last article, or if you have any other feedback, please let me know; it would help a lot.

See you in a month,

Matthieu