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 #196 (comment)

[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!