Pre-selecting specific rows?

[luckman212]

@junegunn

Is there any way to preselect 1 or more rows when fzf is invoked?

e.g. in the below, I was hoping to have fzf appear with apple and peach selected:

echo "apple|banana|peach|pear" | tr '|' '\n' |
fzf --multi

eg. something like

echo "apple|banana|peach|pear" | tr '|' '\n' |
fzf --multi --preselect='apple|peach'

Would be amazing if it supported regex or glob style matches... e.g. the below would match peach and pear

echo "apple|banana|peach|pear" | tr '|' '\n' |
fzf --multi --preselect='^pe.*'

[luckman212]

Safe to assume the answer is no. Please consider this as a FR !

[TobiaszCudnik]

This works for selecting the 2nd row on start:

--bind "start:pos(2)"

You can probably chain pos and select actions to achieve a multi-pre-select.

[LangLangBart]

Based on the provided examples, it seems that the existing options and search syntax already support basic selections¹.

echo "apple|banana|peach|pear" | tr '|' '\n' |
fzf --multi --preselect='apple|peach'

echo -e "apple\nbanana\npeach\npear" |
	fzf --multi --query 'apple | peach' --bind 'load:select-all+clear-query'

echo "apple|banana|peach|pear" | tr '|' '\n' |
fzf --multi --preselect='^pe.*'

echo -e "apple\nbanana\npeach\npear" |
	fzf --multi --query '^pe' --bind 'load:select-all+clear-query'

Footnotes

1. README.md - Search Syntax ↩

[Diegovsky]

This doesn't work if lines can contain similar characters of if the regex is greater than the max allowed characters, like here:

An actual solution would be preferable instead of this big hack.

[LangLangBart]

This doesn't work if lines can contain similar characters

Can you share the command? Did you try the --exact flag or '?

# fuzzy match A*r*c*h
man -k . 2>/dev/null | fzf --query "Arch" --bind 'result:unbind(result)+select-all'
# 143 results

# extra ' to match Arch
man -k . 2>/dev/null | fzf --query "'Arch" --bind 'result:unbind(result)+select-all'
# 7 results