Janet Fuzzy Finder - get through some stdout almost omnisciently and friendly

Alpha Quality SW ahead

My exercise in command-line programming. Think of it as fzf, but without all the fancy stuff, but with one crucial addition: it prints what user has typed if there is no remaining choice, which is excellent in combination with the Tab key.

Even with its simplicity, it has replaced wofi/dmenu utility for me.

Implementation

I am using simple matching and scoring. Best score if choice starts or end with the user input. Second best score if the user input is anywhere in the string. Then fuzzy search with every intermittent char not in user input lower score by -1. All scores start as 0.

Program is stable and responsive until around 1000 (depends on the machine) when the delay starts to be perceivable. I guess it is Janet GC kicking in, as I am not optimizing for memory consumption at all.

Installation:

You need the latest development version of Janet programming language installed. Then you can install jff with the jpm package manager:

[sudo] jpm install https://github.com/pepe/jff.

Usage:

Command line arguments:

 Optional:
 -c, --code VALUE                            Janet function definition to transform result with. The selected choice or the PEG match if grammar provided. Default is print
 -f, --file VALUE                            Read a file rather than stdin for choices.
 -g, --grammar VALUE                         PEG grammar to match with the result. Default nil which means  no matching.
 -h, --help                                  Show this help message.
 -e, --prepare VALUE                         Janet function defition to transform each line with. Default identity.
 -p, --program VALUE                         File with code which must have three function preparer, matcher and transformer.
 -r, --prompt VALUE=>                        Change the prompt. Default: '> '.

jff < $choides will show the choices, and you can start fuzzy finding. List of choices starts to narrow on every char. There are some special, yet standard key combos for navigation:

Down/Ctrl-n/Ctrl-j moves the selection down one item
Up/Ctrl-p/Ctrl-k moves the selection up one item
Tab replaces typed chars with the text of the selection. To narrow the search.
Ctrl-c/Escape exits with error without printing anything
Enter confirms the current selection and matches/transforms/prints it to stdout

Common

Under the ns jff is common module with some functionality, that can be used in in other programs for jff. Well, for now it is only work with prefix. You can use them easily in your programs:

(import jff/common)

(def prefix (string ((os/environ) "HOME") "/Code/"))

(def prepare (common/remove-prefix prefix))

(def transform (common/prepend-prefix prefix))

This script will strip the prefix from all choices and prepend it back to the result. If you save it in /home/user/bin/jff/code.janet file, you can use it with:

#!/bin/sh

lr -1 -o A -A -t type=d  ~/Code/* ~/Code/*/* ~/Code/*/* ~/Code/*/*/* | \
  jff -r 'sess:> ' -p ~/bin/jff/code.janet | \
  xe swaymsg exec -- alacritty --working-directory {}

to open the new terminal window on selected dir.

Examples

Run the function on the result:

lr -1 | janet jff.janet -c '|(print (string/ascii-upper $))'

Match the result with the grammar and then runs the function:

lr -1 | janet jff.janet -g '(<- (to "."))'
                        -c '|(print (string/ascii-upper (first $)))'