Fuzzy file finders are awesome. CtrlP is one of my favorite plugins for Vim and while there are alternatives for Unix based systems I haven’t really found one that I can easily use with Git Bash. I decided to hack together a tiny (one line) shell script that somewhat mimicks a fuzzy file finder, albeit primitively. I named it fz and it’s available in my dotfiles repository.

fz will perform a recursive fuzzy search for all the files you’re looking for. It’s case-insensitive and ignores a couple of directories by default¹. As an example, If I run fz .x in my local dotfiles repository it’ll print the following:

./x/.xcolors
./x/.xbindkeysrc
./x/.xinitrc
./x/.Xresources

fz is mainly meant to be used when you need to find a particular file or a set of files, although it can be used for other actions. For example, if I run it in conjunction with Vim, vim $(fz .x)², I can open all files and populate the argument list in one fell swoop.