Scout

Scout is a small fuzzy finder for you terminal made with rust.

Yes, this is yet another tool inspired by selecta. The main difference with selecta, apart of the language, is the matching and scoring algorithm.

I decided to implement the matching algorithm with regular expressions. Call me crazy, but life is too sort to iterate over endless strings keeping track of indexes of chars with variable sizes. Ok, maybe I'm just bad doing those kind of algorithms. Also, I like regexes, they are kind of a drug for me.

WARNING

I consider this a beta. There are a lot of tests missing and, to be honest, there are parts of rust that I don't understand and I basically copy and paste things from around, so there is a lot of room for improvement.

Scout has been only tested agains linux. It probably works against macOS or any other UNIX as well, but it is not intended to work on Windows.

Installation

Scout is made with rust, so you will need the latest stable version of it to compile and run the program.

Install via cargo

Scout is in the main crates repository, so you can install it just with cargo:

$ cargo install scout

Install via git

Clone the repository and run cargo install from it. You can also run cargo build if you just want to play with it:

$ git clone https://github.com/jhbabon/scout.git path/to/scout
$ cd path/to/scout
$ cargo install

Usage

The main idea is to use this tool with pipes. You get a list of items that you want to filter and pass it to scout. Once you select the item you want, scout will print it to the standard output (stdout).

You can always check the --help option for more info:

$ scout --help
Scout: Small fuzzy finder

This program expects a list of items in the standard input,
so it is better to use it with pipes.

Usage:
  scout [options]

Options:
  -h --help     Show this screen.
  -v --version  Show version.

Supported keys:
   * ^U to delete the entire line
   * ^N or Arrow key down to select the next match
   * ^P or Arrow key up to select the previous match
   * ESC to quit without selecting a match

Example:
  $ ls | scout

VIM integration

You can use the selecta vim snippets with scout, they pretty much work. A fancier plugin to integrate scout with neovim is in the works, so stay tunned!

Development

Scout compiles against the latest stable rust version, so if you want to hack with it be sure to use it.

There are (some) tests. You can run them with cargo test:

$ cargo test