I’ve finally found out how you can use fzf in a much better way, that allows me to search for strings within files, but also display a preview of that file.

Previously to search within files I piped grep into fzf but the trouble was that fzf would read the whole line, and not decipher just the filename, so opening up my note search you would see a line like the below, and fzf’s previewer would read the whole line as the filename, and obviously fail to open a preview.

/home/jprice/my/documents/notes/20200516211955.md:# Git Commit Tags

All I have to do was read the manual! Which states:

--preview=COMMAND - Execute the given command for the current line and display the result on the preview window. {} in the command is the placeholder that is replaced to the single-quoted string of the current line. To transform the replacement string, specify field index expressions between the braces (See FIELD INDEX EXPRESSION for the details).

It turns out, using a thing called “Field Index Expressions” I could do something like --preview 'bat {1}' and it would select the first string, which is the filename, so that meant I could now preview the file name properly! I could also pass it a delimiter with --delimiter ':' and that allowed me to ensure that the : between the filename and the grep result wasn’t considered as part of the {1} selection, so even with the HTML files in my archive the preview would always preview the right filename! Amazing!

The final command is below:

grep --recursive --exclude-dir={scripts,views} "" $HOME/my/documents/notes/ | sort --reverse | fzf --delimiter ':' --preview "bat --italic-text=always --theme=base16 --style=numbers --color=always {1}"