interactive global search

[dofinn]

The reason I use vim is for ripgrep and fzf. This makes for extremly fast navigation.

Request:

• Ability to index files in active directory and search via FZF

• Ability to grep through fies in active directory and pipe results in fzf

• ripgrep file_config | fzf <- this opens up in same preview window that FZF provides.

There are many blogs etc writing about this method in vim. EG: https://sidneyliebrand.medium.com/how-fzf-and-ripgrep-improved-my-workflow-61c7ca212861

[kirawi]

Should this be a core feature of Helix or be implemented as a plugin?

[pickfire]

I personally think this should be core feature. We already have like skim like thing, implementing ripgrep is just near.

[dofinn]

is a dependecy on ripgrep something you want to make mandatory? I would imagine having these functions pluggable grep=plugin(ripgrep) find=plugin(fzf)

[pickfire]

I don't think we will pull in ripgrep. We may be implementing our own which is slightly slower compared to ripgrep but work well for our usecase.

[vv9k]

We could also just import the grep_searcher crate that ripgrep uses internally. It's published to crates.io

https://docs.rs/grep-searcher/0.1.7/grep_searcher/

And walkdir for recursive file system traversal https://docs.rs/walkdir/2.3.2/walkdir/

[dofinn]

so excuse me for being an idiot. The file picker is already aweesome! cancel the FZF request

[archseer]

I do think a preview window + some way to actually search through files would be useful though :)

I think there should be a general way to pipe data into the built-in picker.

[dofinn]

I agree, after using it last night i did miss the preview window + the actual fuzzy finding where i could use multiple terms seperated by whitespace rather then the exact path/to/target/file

[archseer]

The finding is fuzzy (we use skim's algorithm, we just don't highlight the matched characters yet.

[nrdxp]

Does Helix use skim as a library?

[sudormrfbin]

Does Helix use skim as a library?

We're using the fuzzy-matcher crate which is used internally by skim.

[heliostatic]

Another vote for searching via the grep_searcher crate in the preview UI used for the picker, per https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/196#issuecomment-858283651

[pppKin]

Hi! I too think that being able to perform a search in current workspace would be immensely helpful. So I started messing around and implemented something myself . It's not pretty I know, but it's something for us to talk about as least. My implementation bind space + / to display a prompt (like the search prompt), and on Enter, start the search, gathers the result and pop up a FilePicker. A few necessary changes are made, such as regex_prompt now accepts an extra callback that would be invoked once Enter is pressed. There may be some best practices I missed or some corner cases that I don't know about, but hopefully this can be improved by the community. So before I rush to create a PR, I just want to know if you guys have any thought on what this should look like and how it should be properly implemented. Thank you!

[archseer]

That's pretty cool! I think instead of grep you will want to import grep_matcher and grep_regex so we avoid some of the extra deps (we don't need grep_printer for example). grep is just a facade that re-exports all these crates: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/crates/grep/src/lib.rs

I'm also wondering if we might want to do this without the prompt and just do this interactively in the picker as the user types. It's a bit wasteful though so maybe there could be a key to refresh (ctrl-r or something like it)

The binary detection part is really cool and we likely want to use that in the file preview as well to avoid displaying binary files (on space + f).

[pppKin]

import grep_matcher and grep_regex so we avoid some of the extra deps (we don't need grep_printer for example)

You're right, I will be cleaning it up shortly :)

Edited: Updated. But I seem to have messed up my forked branch to include a commit that was not mine(due to some incorrect git rebase I think), after resolving that I'll be creating a PR so that it's easier for everyone to review:)

[pppKin]

just do this interactively in the picker as the user types

@archseer Interactive picker might be a more intuitive option, but I wonder what would be a proper way to fuzzily select a file in search results in said picker? Perhaps add another input field and another key binding to switch between them?

[archseer]

That would be an option, but from what I've seen in other plugins (telescope.nvim) there's simply no fuzzy file select, you just scroll the list (we could probably add ctrl-d/u page up/down so the list is easier to scroll faster). When I'm searching for something I usually don't know the filename so I'll traverse the list to find the correct entry.

I do see a case for being able to limit the set of files we search for beforehand though, for example if I'm searching for results inside _test.go files. In that case I think we could space + f, _test.go to fuzzy find files, then space + \ should search through that subset of files.

[EpocSquadron]

@archseer I think this is implemented, any reason to keep this open?

[pickfire]

Interactive prompt is not available yet so it will be kept open.

[weakphish]

any update on this? I can take a crack at it if not.

[archseer]

Have you looked at the linked PRs? Requires https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/3172 and https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/3110

[johnrichardrinehart]

@archseer I see #3110 linked above, but not #3172 . Is there an open PR for this feature which explicitly depends on #3172 and #3110 or are you saying that no work fro this feature can/will be done until those two PRs are merged?

[sudormrfbin]

There's no open PR for this issue, but the code in #3110 and #3172 introduce a kind of picker that allows re-populating it with different results whenever the search query changes instead of simply filtering the list, which is essentially what we need for an interactive search (re-run the global search whenever the query changes and inject into the list).

[johnrichardrinehart]

I understand. #3172 has been merged 🎉. I understand there's some desire to to block #3110 on a debouncing feature. But, I'm worried that this may further delay the implementation of this feature - especially since no one has yet complained about input lag that would be ameliorated by the denouncing (not that they'd really had the chance, but addressing performance problems before they're identified as issues maybe shouldn't block new features).

[sudormrfbin]

I was initially going to put the debouncing as a TODO, but I could already experience input lag on a release build with rust-analyzer as a test case LSP if I type with the speed of knowing exactly what I'm looking for. Granted it's not a huge blocker, but I'd like to get them in together.

[johnrichardrinehart]

Okay, I understand. Thanks for your contributions to this project and I look forward to testing/playing with your work!

[amstaniec]

I came up with nushell script command interactive global search (external to helix) using rg and fzf, so also works on MS Windows It shows only with single line of preview, but still quite usable. For nushell users, put this in of your config.nu:

def rghx [] {
  let li = ((rg -e '.' --no-heading -n --color always | fzf --ansi) | lines |  split row ':')
  hx ([$li.0, ':', $li.1] | str join)  
}

run it in the repo root folder, and start typing to search, enter to open in helix

can be easily translated to different shell script

[davxy]

This is something I use in bash

#!/bin/bash

# Search using rg and fzf with preview
out=$(rg . --line-number --column --no-heading --glob '!.git' | \
      fzf +i --exact --delimiter : --preview 'batcat --style=full --color=always --highlight-line {2} {1}' --preview-window 'up,~4,+{2}+4/2')

# Remove cruft leaving something like: 'file:line:column'
ref=$(echo $out | sed -E 's/([a-zA-Z0-9/-_]*):([0-9]*):([0-9]*):.*/\1:\2:\3/')
hx $ref

Would be super useful to open the found file in a running instance of helix... Is there a hack to do this?

[predmijat]

I'm not sure about the running instance, but you can open it in new one by editing FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS variable and adding something like this:

export FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS='... ,ctrl-o:execute(hx $(echo {} | cut -d ":" -f1))

I have this in my .zprofile since I'm using zsh, check where you shell sets FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS.

[obxhdx]

@davxy, and anyone else interested: I hacked something together for this, you can read about it on my post on r/HelixEditor.