[question] Action to toggle multi selection

[Eduardo D Sanchez]

Checklist

• I have read through the manual page (man fzf)
• I have searched through the existing issues
• For bug reports, I have checked if the bug is reproducible in the latest version of fzf

Output of fzf --version

0.50.0 (0.50.0)

OS

• Linux
• macOS
• Windows
• Etc.

Shell

• bash
• zsh
• fish

Problem / Steps to reproduce

Is there an action that toggles multi to allow you to select multiple options or restrict to a single option through a binding?

I couldn't find any toggle-multi action or a select/deselect action that would do something similar.

[Junegunn Choi]

No. Do you have a use case?

[Eduardo D Sanchez]

Yes. I have some scripts that do a multi purpose selection but some make sense to restrict the selection to a single item.

A simple example from one of my scripts

getsources |
  fzf --multi \
        --prompt 'Projects> ' \
        --multi \
        --bind 'ctrl-f:change-prompt(Files> )+reload(fd --type file . {})+unbind(ctrl-f)' \
        --bind 'ctrl-p:change-prompt(Projects> )+reload(getsources)+rebind(ctrl-f)'

I'm expecting either multiple files or a single directory. At the moment I added a check for the first item so if I accidentally select multiple directories, it just picks the first one and ignores the rest to prevent errors. It would be nice though if I could change the multi state as an action when picking directories so I can avoid validation logic. I imagine this can be useful for other multi purpose selection.

[Junegunn Choi]

Yeah, in that case, change-multi(LIMIT) would make sense.

• change-multi: --multi (unlimited)
• change-multi(0): --no-multi
• change-multi(N): --multi N (maximum N items)

toggle-multi will not be very useful.

[Eduardo D Sanchez]

I agree, if you can set N number of items, it would be better.

[Junegunn Choi]

Please note that change-multi will clear previous selections. I couldn't think of any use case where you would want to keep the previous selections, so I just decided to keep it simple.

[Eduardo D Sanchez]

I think that works fine. Thanks!