TIL: Using fzf to search in command history

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Published on January 16th, 2020
By Armno P.

Today I learned how to do a fuzzy search in command history using fzf, and a bit about sed.

It is useful when I want to search for a specific command I ran before, but I don’t really remember what it was. For example,

$ docker-compose exec php artisan migrate --seed

With help of fzf, I can easily search through commands list in history and find what I want using the fuzzy search.

h in action


macOS sed and GNU sed

In the Examples page of fzf repo, there are examples of fh() functions that uses fzf to search in command history.

# https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/wiki/examples#command-history
# fh - repeat history
fh() {
  print -z $( ([ -n "$ZSH_NAME" ] && fc -l 1 || history) | fzf +s --tac | sed -r 's/ *[0-9]*\*? *//' | sed -r 's/\\/\\\\/g')
}

When I run fh function in the terminal, fzf works fine. I can do the search. But when I select a command I want, I got an error from sed.

sed: illegal option -- r
usage: sed script [-Ealn] [-i extension] [file ...]
       sed [-Ealn] [-i extension] [-e script] ... [-f script_file] ... [file ...]
sed: illegal option -- r
usage: sed script [-Ealn] [-i extension] [file ...]
       sed [-Ealn] [-i extension] [-e script] ... [-f script_file] ... [file ...]

I did some Google search, and found that sed on macOS is not the same with sed on Linux. That’s why I don’t have -r option in my sed as I’m using macOS Catalina.

To fix that, There are 2 options

fh() {
  print -z $( ([ -n "$ZSH_NAME" ] && fc -l 1 || history) | fzf +s --tac | sed -E 's/ *[0-9]*\*? *//' | sed -E 's/\\/\\\\/g')
}
$ brew install gnu-sed
fh() {
  print -z $( ([ -n "$ZSH_NAME" ] && fc -l 1 || history) | fzf +s --tac | gsed -r 's/ *[0-9]*\*? *//' | gsed -r 's/\\/\\\\/g')
}

I go with the first option.

Finally, I add --height 50% option to fzf so it takes only half of the screen. I also rename the function to just h() to make it easier to remember. (“h for history”)

h() {
  print -z $( ([ -n "$ZSH_NAME" ] && fc -l 1 || history) | fzf +s --tac --height "50%" | sed -E 's/ *[0-9]*\*? *//' | sed -E 's/\\/\\\\/g')
}

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