til/unix/show-a-file-preview-when-searching-with-fzf.md

Show A File Preview When Searching With FZF

FZF by itself is a great way to fuzzy find files. It gets even better when you can view a preview of a file before opening it up. The --preview flag lets you do just this.

Add a basic file preview with cat:

$ fzf --preview 'cat {}'

The {} will get replaced a single-quoted string of the highlighted file.

You can spice up the preview a bit with color and line numbers using bat:

$ fzf --preview 'bat --color "always" {}'

The --color flag tells bat to produce syntax highlighted output even though it isn't in interactive mode.

Lastly, you can keep it performant by only showing the first 100 lines:

$ fzf --preview 'bat --color "always" --line-range 0:100 {}'

See man fzf for more details.

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