Quickly find and open a pdf among a collection of thousands of unsorted pdfs through fzf (fuzzy finder)
Requirements. Make sure the following requirements are satisfied:
pdftotext
. This comes with the texlive distribution on linux,
On ubuntu, sudo apt-get install poppler-utils
. fzf
: https://github.com/junegunn/fzfGNU grep
, ag
(silver searcher).Install binary. Do either one of the two steps below:
go
and go get
.
With a working golang
installation, do
go install github.com/bellecp/fast-p@v0.2.5
It will fetch the code and its dependencies,
compile and create an executable fast-p
in the /bin
folder of your go
installation, typically ~/go/bin
. Make sure the command fast-p
can be
found (for instance, add ~/go/bin
to your $PATH
.)fast-p
can be found. For instance,
put the binary file fast-p
in ~/custom/bin
and add export PATH=~/custom/bin:$PATH
to your .bashrc
.Tweak your .bashrc. Add the following code to your .bashrc
p () {
open=xdg-open # this will open pdf file withthe default PDF viewer on KDE, xfce, LXDE and perhaps on other desktops.
ag -U -g ".pdf$" \
| fast-p \
| fzf --read0 --reverse -e -d $'\t' \
--preview-window down:80% --preview '
v=$(echo {q} | tr " " "|");
echo -e {1}"\n"{2} | grep -E "^|$v" -i --color=always;
' \
| cut -z -f 1 -d $'\t' | tr -d '\n' | xargs -r --null $open > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
}
- You may replace ``ag -U -g ".pdf$"`` with another command that returns a list of pdf files.
- You may replace ``open=...`` by your favorite PDF viewer, for instance ``open=evince`` or ``open=okular``.
# Installation on OSX with homebrew
1. Install [homebrew](https://brew.sh/) and __run__
brew install bellecp/fast-p/fast-pdf-finder
_The above brew formula is experimental.
Please report any issues/suggestions/feedback at <https://github.com/bellecp/fast-p/issues/11>_
2. __Tweak your .bashrc__. Add the following code to your ``.bashrc``
p () { local open open=open # on OSX, "open" opens a pdf in preview ag -U -g ".pdf$" \ | fast-p \ | fzf --read0 --reverse -e -d $'\t' \ --preview-window down:80% --preview ' v=$(echo {q} | gtr " " "|"); echo -e {1}"\n"{2} | ggrep -E "^|$v" -i --color=always; ' \ | gcut -z -f 1 -d $'\t' | gtr -d '\n' | gxargs -r --null $open > /dev/null 2> /dev/null }
- You may replace ``ag -U -g ".pdf$"`` with another command that returns a list of pdf files.
- You may replace ``open=...`` by your favorite PDF viewer, for instance ``open=evince`` or ``open=okular``.
__Remark:__ On OSX, we use the command line tools ``gcut``, ``gxargs``, ``ggrep``, ``gtr`` which are the GNU versions
of the tools ``cut``, ``xargs``, ``grep``, ``tr``. This way, we avoid the specifics of the versions of these tools pre-installed on OSX,
and the same ``.bashrc`` code can be used for both OSX and GNU Linux systems.
# Usage
Use the command ``p`` to browse among the PDF files in the current directory and its subdirectories.
The first run of the command will take some time to cache the text extracted from each pdf. Further runs of the command will be much faster since the text extraction will only apply to new pdfs.
# How to clear the cache?
To clear the cache (which contains text extracted from PDF), you can run 'fast-p --clear-cache'. This will safely remove the file located at:
``~/.cache/fast-p-pdftotext-output/fast-p_cached_pdftotext_output.db``
For older versions, please manually delete the cache file found at
``~/.cache/fast-p_cached_pdftotext_output.db``
# Launch with keyboard shortcut in Ubuntu
On Ubuntu desktop (tested in 18.04), one may add a keyboard shortcut to launch a new terminal running the ``p`` command right away.
With the following script, the new terminal window will automatically close after choosing a PDF.
Create a file ``~/.fast-p-rc`` with
source .bashrc p; sleep 0.15; exit;
and in Ubuntu Settings/Keyboard, add a custom shortcut that runs the command
``gnome-terminal -- sh -c "bash --rcfile .fast-p-rc"``.
# See it in action
![illustration of the p command](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1019692/34446795-12229072-ecac-11e7-856a-ec0df0de60ae.gif)
# Is the historical bash code still available?
Yes, see https://github.com/bellecp/fast-p/blob/master/p but using the go binary as explained above is recommended for speed and interoperability.