Git is an essential and powerful tool for any software developer. As part of your developer workflow, you might find yourself juggling between different projects and features all the time.
Given so, it's very hard to keep track of all the names of the branches between projects, especially when coming back to it after some time. So one common cumbersome procedure is looking up the name of the branch you want to get on that specific project and git checkout to it.
To achieve so, you first need to get all the branch names of the current project. Fortunately for us, git has a command for this, for-each-ref. What it does is iterate over all the references, which is a readable name that points to the SHA-1 ids of git artifacts (e.g commits), given a pattern. For example, getting refs/heads returns a list of all the references of the head commits for each branch.
You can iterate on these references to print all the branches on the terminal by using the following command:
Figure 1: command for showing all the git branches ordered by descendent author-date
Of course, you can format and sort the results however you like. The next step would be to be able to interact with that list of branches, like selecting one, copying one, searching, and/or filtering the results.
A pretty useful command for that is the well-known grep, which allows us to find patterns in the results. For example, we could chain the output of the branches command to grep pattern to search for branches that match the pattern.
I want to only see the branches which are prefixed with fix because I want to come back to fix that pesky bug? no problem, git branches | grep fix would do the filtering (pst, adding an alias to the branches command is pretty useful). Then you can copy the branch name and check out to it
... But what if we want to interactively filter the branches and navigate through them, as well as binding keyboard commands to actions? (to, for example, check out to a branch using enter!)... you can easily do that with Fzf.
Introducing Fzf
Fzf is a grep on steroids. According to the description, it is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder.
fzf is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder.
It's an interactive filter program for any kind of list; files, command
history, processes, hostnames, bookmarks, git commits, etc. It implements
a "fuzzy" matching algorithm, so you can quickly type in patterns with omitted
characters and still get the results you want.
Highlights
📦 Portable — Distributed as a single binary for easy installation
⚡ Blazingly fast — Highly optimized code instantly processes millions of items
🛠️ Extremely versatile — Fully customizable via an event-action binding mechanism
🔋 Batteries included — Includes integration with bash, zsh, fish, Vim, and Neovim
Sponsors ❤️
I would like to thank all the sponsors of this project who make it possible for me to continue to improve fzf.
Fzf grabs the output of any command, being it a list, processes, text... and lets you search and filter these results interactively and navigate through them. You can also assign key bindings to commands on your search.
With it, we can search and navigate through any directory easily and look for files, also adding some key bindings e.g opening the file in vscode when clicking enter and copying the filename path with tab.
Figure 2: command for searching and navigating through a directory with key bindings using fzf
Figure 3: output of the ls command using fzf
The above example uses bat instead of cat for previewing files, as it includes some nice features like syntax highlighting and also shows modifications on files by integrating with git.
Creating the interactive branch navigator with Fzf
With the fzf command in place, we can pipe our git branches command [Fig. 1] to the fzf part of [Fig. 2] with some tweaking of the key bindings, and that will allow us to filter, copy and check out branches, just like that:
Figure 4: command for interactively searching git branches,checking them out by pressing `enter` and copying the branch name by using `tab`
You can then bind the command to some git alias in ~/.gitconfig, I have it assigned to git brs.
Figure 5: assigning a git alias for the command
Fzf includes numerous built-in key bindings as exiting with escape or navigating with scrolling/arrows, to name a couple. Try extending the command by adding more key bindings that fit your workflow!
Here's a short example of the command in action:
Figure 6: interactive branch navigation command example on the terminal
That's it! ✨
And you, what other amazing fzf commands do you use, or would you create to improve your development workflow?
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