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.

Scout only works on UNIX systems because it opens a pseudo terminal using /dev/tty. This pseudo terminal is used to display the UI and get user's input.

WARNING

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. Check out rustup for rust installations.

Install via release packages

Each release, since version v1.0.0 (not included), has a package with scout compiled for different architectures. You can try to donwload and install the package that match your architecture.

You can find the releases in their GitHub page.

Install via cargo

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

$ cargo install scout

Remember to put cargo bin path to the main $PATH env variable:

export PATH=$PATH:~/.cargo/bin

Install via git

Clone the repository and run cargo install from it:

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

You can also run cargo build --release if you just want to play with it.

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: 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 [--search=<query>]
  scout -h | --help
  scout -v | --version

Options:
  -s --search=<query>  Start the search with the given query
  -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:
  $ find * -type f | scout

  # Pass an initial query to start filtering right away
  $ find * -type f | scout --search=foo

NEOVIM integration

I made a plugin to use scout inside neovim thanks to its built in :terminal emulator. It's called scout.vim.

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

Code formatting

Use rustfmt to format the code in a consistent manner. More precisely, use rustfmt-nightly. Since scout is built against the stable version of rust, you can use rustfmt-nightly with rustup:

# Install rustfmt-nightly
$ rustup run nightly cargo install rustfmt-nightly

# Run it with cargo
$ rustup run nightly cargo fmt

Linter

Use clippy to improve the code. As with rustfmt, clippy needs nightly version of rust to run:

# Install clippy
$ rustup run nightly cargo install clippy

# Run it with cargo
$ rustup run nightly cargo clippy

Now you can go through the list of warnings and fix them.