Why aren't you using Telescope yet?
An extendable fuzzy-finder for all your file searching needs
Hello again! I’m Nat Bennett, and you’re reading Mastering Neovim, a newsletter about improving your Neovim setup.
Expect issues to be more irregular for the next few months, because I’ve just started a new job and will be focusing on that while I get ramped up. I am still using Neovim, and I’m in the process of configuring it for the new stack I’m working with, so I’ll be able to write about that.
This week I’ve been giving the telescope plugin a workout, and man, it is nice. It’s a customizable fuzzy finder with a lot of built in pickers, and for me at least it completely replaces any other text search and file tree browsing plugins I might use.
I haven’t set up any keymaps yet, so I’ve been using Ex commands— mainly these two.
:Telescope find_files
:Telescope live_grep
find_files
searches by path, while live_grep
does a full-text search of the files themselves.
I will probably bind these to ff
and fg
later this week but when I first add a new capability to Neovim I like getting the hang of it without keybindings first.
Another nice thing about Telescope is that it can search itself. If you run just the command
:Telescope
it brings up a fuzzy-findable picker with just its own commands, with documentation.
So I expect I’ll be exploring those capabilities over the next few weeks.
The main downside compared to fzf
is that I’ve seen reports that it’s slow on extremely large codebases. This isn’t something I’m likely to personally run into, so I’d be interested to hear from anyone who does have experience with it.
Overall though, highly recommend taking this one for a spin if you haven’t already.