Terminate on ESC and Ctrl+[ - would you like a contribution?

[ghost]

I am using heatseeker for my reverse-search implementation (the one coming up when pressing ctrl+R in bash/zsh), and noticed that it doesn't behave intuitively to me quite yet because some keybindings are missing.

Would you like me to contribute support for this?

[rschmitt]

I would, this feature makes perfect sense. I guess I never thought to add it because I got used to using C-g instead. Can you also include a Windows implementation? The virtual-key code is VK_ESCAPE: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd375731(v=vs.85).aspx

[ghost]

Hi @rschmitt, thanks for your reply. After further testing heatseeker I realized it's not quite ready yet as a ctrl+R replacement. One reason is that it does not prefer (i.e. does not seem to know) more recent entries of the history file, and the screen refresh is very flickery. That is why I just switched to using fzf, which seems to do it all just perfectly. It's just that I would have preferred a Rust implementation, but Go is quite fine for 10k lines of history lines too :).

[rschmitt]

Did you try invoking hs with --filter-only? That will cause it to prefer recent entries.

[rschmitt]

Here's my shell function for history handling:

# Replace the shell's built-in ^R handling
fuzzy_history() {
    echo
    BUFFER=$(history 1 | sort -n -r | perl -ne 's/^\s*[0-9]+\*?\s+//; print unless $seen{$_}++' | hs --filter-only)
    echo -n "\033[1A"
    zle accept-search
    zle reset-prompt
    zle end-of-line
}

zle -N fuzzy_history
bindkey "^R" "fuzzy_history"

[rschmitt]

By the way, I agree with you about the flickery redraws, but I think that I can fix that on the POSIX side with some simple buffering.

[rschmitt]

@Byron-TW Can you try the latest commit, a2216886fda79e2a011eee01d4a5f1c83bc358e1? The screen refresh flickering should be significantly improved.

[ghost]

Thanks for your effort! heatseeker 1.5.0 multi-threaded (a221688) (built 2017-02-02 16:36:20 +0100 for x86_64-apple-darwin) still showed the flickering issue, unfortunately. Please note that I am using alacritty, which delivers 60fps constantly, which might make the issue more pronounced than it actually is.

I have also tried the function you provided, but it seemed that the it would now prefer recent lines even though their match was actually worse. I don't know how fzf does it, but it just yields the results I would expect. Maybe you can compare the results and see what they do differnently - right now hs seems to be the best contender from the Rust world.

[rschmitt]

You're using alacritty? In that case you need to build alacritty from the save-restore-cursor branch (c247acf), otherwise heatseeker cannot function correctly at all. I specifically tested build a221688 of hs on alacritty.

[ghost]

Wow, thanks for pointing this out. I didn't get to try it yet, but trust you it is working. Once it has been merged into master, I will benefit from it as well! Thanks so much for your work!