how to use fzf on Mac Terminal with bash
I suggest that you read through the README page. You need a basic level of understanding of shell scripting in order to fully utilize fzf.
fzf is a Unix filter just like grep or sed, and all it does is to print the selected items. What to do with the output is completely up to you.
1) After I run fzf and run a file, I press Enter and then the file I found is output in Terminal. Instead of Enter, what key should I press to copy that file path to my pastebin?
You can use pbcopy
command to store the result in clipboard like so:
fzf | pbcopy
More conventional way to use fzf is to use it with command substitution:
cat $(fzf)
Or to use the CTRL-T
key binding that pastes the names of the selected files onto the command line:
cat <CTRL-T>
2) Ideally, I'd like to be able to do something like this: cat where I type part of the name of a file and then press a hotkey to start an fzf search for that pattern. Is there a way to do this?
fzf is shipped with fuzzy-completion for bash. See here for more details. To invoke auto-completion, append two asterisks to the pattern and hit the tab key as follows:
cat pat**<Tab>
If you don't use bash, the closest you can do is to use CTRL-T keybinding mentioned above.
See: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#key-bindings-for-command-line
I tried installing fzf via homebrew and my CTRL-T and pat** shortcuts also did not work. I found that fzf added some commands to my .bashrc, but my .bashrc doesn't get called.
[ -f ~/.fzf.bash ] && source ~/.fzf.bash
Putting that same source statement from .bashrc into .bash_aliases did the trick for me.