Find things. Fast.

FastFinder is command line tool to help navigate through large codebases (think 10GB+). It works by first storing all file names found within a directory into a cache. FastFinder executes case-insensitive grep on this cache and displays the results to the user. Selection is done by entering the number next to the result, which will prepend the path by any command passed by the user.

This makes finding and opening a file in your favourite text editor an easy two-step process. The flexibility of FastFinder also makes it really easy to use commands like p4 edit and git diff on specific files. The default command for FastFinder is vim.

FastFinder primarily serves as an alternative to running multiple find commands or text editor search features. This tools also works well with ctags and cscope which work in a similar manner.

# Quick start
ff -init
ff QUERY  # Searches for files matching QUERY

# Change the command for this query only
ff -cmd=emacs QUERY

# Change the default command for queries
ff -set-default="git diff"
ff -config      # View the current default command

1. Download the ff file located here and place it in a directory of your choosing (I will use ~/.tools in this example)
2. Add the directory with ff to your PATH. Remember to refresh your profile (e.g. source ~/.bashrc)

# Example: Add the following line to your ~/.bashrc
export PATH=$PATH:~/.tools          # Replace with your directory

3. Run ff --help to get started!