Display completion on multiple columns [FR]

[alecandido]

Just a quick feature: multicolumns

Problem

Often my terminals are wider than taller.

Describe the solution you'd like

The one in the title.

Additional context

I just moved to fzf-tab from the default autocompletion coming with oh-my-zsh. It's wonderful and plenty of features, but the very only thing I lack it's having the completion spanning the full length of my terminal. This is not always what I want: sometimes it's far better to have them on a single column, e.g. when the options are described, but this is exactly what happened with the former completion (oh-my-zsh).

Probably it's just a matter of taste, but I tried to look in the repo, the wiki and the issues for configuring fzf-tab this way and I didn't find anything. Since quite a lot of other configs are available, why not this one? (the moment someone is able to implement it...)

[NightMachinery]

This should be a feature request for fzf, no?

[alecandido]

I might be wrong but the bare fzf displays differently form fzf-tab on my machine, so I assume it is doing some formatting.

At the end of the day fzf it's supposed to be the backend, not the formatter, am I wrong?

• fzf
• fzf-tab

[NightMachinery]

It's not impossible to implement this on top of fzf, but it would be a hack. This feature is a general thing for fzf, and needs to be its own thing. Worst case scenario, the hack itself needs to be a separate repo fzf-multicolumn, so that it is reusable.

PS: Check out lib/-ftb-fzf to see the fzf command that fzf-tab finally runs.

[Aloxaf]

As NightMachinary said, this is impossible unless I fork fzf. (In fact, I indeed have such a plan)

[NightMachinery]

As NightMachinary said, this is impossible unless I fork fzf. (In fact, I indeed have such a plan)

fzf might accept a PR there: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/issues/1476

[alecandido]

Looks like junegunn also provided a solution using tmux, using an alternative command that is directly available from the fzf main repo: fzf-tmux

If you're on tmux, using fzf-tmux can be an option. e.g. fzf-tmux -r 20%

It's not really the multicolumn layout I wished, but it can be an option, at least for someone. Is it possible to use that one as a backend for fzf-tab? Just adding it in the configuration like:

zstyle ':fzf-tab:*' fzf-command "fzf-tmux -r 20%"

(this exact one is currently not working)

[NICHOLAS85]

Checkout https://github.com/Aloxaf/fzf-tab/wiki/Configuration#fzf-command if you want to use fzf-tmux

[alecandido]

@NICHOLAS85 I checked, and indeed I took the command above exactly from there, but it is not junegunn's fzf-tmux!

Moreover ftb-tmux-popup explicitly requires tmux version 3.2, and e.g. I'm on plain Ubuntu 20.10 (rather a common setup) and tmux version is 3.1b. Thank you very much for your advice, it's quite fancy and interesting (this is why I already checked :wink:) but definitely it's not the same thing.

P.S.: mine was a follow up on @NightMachinary 's linked PR, but it's rather off topic in this issue.