Fzf on Andrew Quinn's TILs

The highest personal ROI program I have written so far

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It would have to be finstem, a simple command-line program I wrote to reduce Finnish words down to their root form.

Finnish is a lot like Latin or Russian in that its words often become lumbering behemoths of rewritten consonants, suffixes upon suffixes, and this makes it hard to look up in a dictionary – that is, until you factor in its very regular orthography and the phenomenal efforts of the Finnish programming industry: finstem is basically a very specialized UI for the OpenOffice spell checker, and I have no shame in admitting that.

Getting `fzf` to print the preview pane

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

fzf is an incredibly useful bit of software, if someone shows you how to use it. There’s a lot more to it than just fuzzy-switching directories and fuzzy-searching you shell history – it also comes with a preview pane that updates on every keystroke. Try

`1`	`echo '' \| fzf --preview 'echo {q} {q}'`

and typing something to see how it works. ({q} is the query you type in at the bottom of the screen.)

Promoting Blog Tag Reuse with `fzf`

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Some more updates to the main repo of this TIL site today, in particular I have added a new fzf-tags.fish script.

til uses this script to

Scrapes all the YAML tags: frontmatter from all current Markdown posts,
Puts me into a multi-select fzf menu containing them, and
Puts anything I select into the tags: of the new blog post.

Tags form natural breadcrumb trails throughout a blog as it grows organically over time. Many an afternoon have I spent reading one or two particular tags of interest from a prolific blog. But, if you don’t remember to reuse the tags in the first place, you’ll never build the trail in the first place.