Command history via fzf

[gjeusel]

Hello Mister Slenders !
I love your library and am using it daily.

I would really enjoy a new feature about browsing command history via ctrl-r doing an I-search backward that makes use of fzf.

This insanely useful tool has already been integrated in shells, vim and much more.

I think it might be a nice integration to have in a python repl, with potentially multi-select (which would cover the history page functionalities).

I found a python binding on github: pyfzf.

Please tell me what you think !

[jonathanslenders]

I like the idea!

We should support this in prompt_toolkit and then ptpython can make use of it.

I see two interesting things we can do:

1. Similar to the fuzzy completer that we have already (https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit/blob/master/prompt_toolkit/completion/fuzzy_completer.py), we can do a fuzzy history search. Pressing ctrl-r should in this case bring up the same search prompt, but the history is filtered exactly like the fuzzy completer does. This poses in interesting challenge for visualisation, but I think it can be done.

2. Use the real fzf in a subprocess to filter the history. We can replace the ctrl-r key binding with this. Then pipe the whole history into fzf and take the output. As far as I understand, fzf doesn't support multiline entries, so we have to pass them to fzf as a single line. Not sure, but I think this can be done without changes to prompt_toolkit itself.

I think about it, it's a very nice idea.

[fd2]

There is also Percol, which is written in Python: https://github.com/mooz/percol
While perhaps not as fuzzy as fzf, it's a useful line selector. It can also be imported and used without needing a subprocess.

[iolpltuisciaoln]

hi i just came across your tool its amazing! but with fzf it will be absolutely incomparable imho, tenx!

[plutonium-239]

Hello, are there any plans to support this? It would be quite amazing
If not through fzf, then as @fd2 suggested, percol is also a good python-based alternative.