fzf
Hacker ApprovedThe most recommended of 86 privilege escalation tools
Fast fuzzy finder that adds interactive search to shell history, files and scripts. Caveat: slow on very large directories.
Fast fuzzy finder that adds interactive search to shell history, files and scripts. Caveat: slow on very large directories.
83 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 78
- criticize it
- 5
- approval share
- 94%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 78 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 16 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fuzzy history search with Ctrl-R
“I always install fzf now, including the shell integrations like fuzzy history search bound to ctrl-r.”
Comment from 19 Oct 2026 in “Faster command recall with substring search” “Massively improves searching through history. It's worth the install just for that one feature.”
Comment from 26 Mar 2026 in “Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)” “You don't need aliases when you have fzf fuzzy history search with ctrl-r”
Comment from 9 Apr 2026 in “The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code” - Comment from 26 Jul 2026 in “Stinkpot: SQLite-Backed Shell History”
- Comment from 24 Feb 2026 in “The Missing Semester of Your CS Education”
- Comment from 26 Mar 2026 in “Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)”
- Comment from 26 Mar 2026 in “Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)”
Picker for scripts and pipelines
“fzf has greatly improved my terminal experience and I tend to incorporate it into almost every script”
Comment from 12 Nov 2025 in “The terminal of the future” “fzf can be used to build up almost any useful way of selecting things that you can imagine”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “The vi family” “Now I rely on standard input and standard output, and `fzf` for all the rest.”
Comment from 22 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: What is your opinion on TUI applications” - Comment from 31 Aug 2026 on Hacker News
- Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code”
Fast on large lists
“fzf can search through 100k entries easily without any delay”
Comment from 26 Jul 2026 in “Stinkpot: SQLite-Backed Shell History” “for 50,000 rows I'd much rather just use fzf/nucleo/tv against json files”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “Find 'Abbey Road when type 'Beatles abbey rd': Fuzzy/Semantic search in Postgres” “cant imagine navigating a large fs without them now”
Comment from 12 Apr 2026 in “Midnight Captain – A midnight commander inspired file manager” - Comment from 3 Jan 2026 in “2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop”
Extensible with many add-ons
“FZF is just a picker, but it has a ton of extensions.”
Comment from 22 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: What is your opinion on TUI applications” “Combining the tmux popup with fzf creates a crazy opportunity of whats possible.”
Comment from 19 Oct 2026 in “Tmux and Claude Code: Sessions, Send-Keys, and the Ceiling” “Polished interactivity is easy to build by just embedding a copy of fzf”
Comment from 13 Dec 2025 in “Using Python for Scripting”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Slow on large directories or data
“found the initial indexing to be a bit slower + add latency vs SQLite”
Comment from 1 Dec 2025 in “Atuin’s New Runbook Execution Engine” “Fzf is no nice unless you trigger it on a dir too big”
Comment from 5 Oct 2026 in “Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back” Missing features and inconsistent syncing
“where fzf doesn't seem to sync it all the time”
Comment from 10 Jan 2026 in “You probably don't need Oh My Zsh” “This is something I was missing in fzf”
Comment from 26 May 2026 in “Matchmaker: A Powerful and Modern Searcher”
Other privilege escalation tools people recommend
The four most recommended other privilege escalation tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| fzfThis page | 78 | 5 | 94% | 12 | — | Approved |
| jq | 75 | 33 | 69% | 12 | — | Approved |
| grep | 65 | 19 | 77% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Atuin | 63 | 24 | 72% | 11 | 2 yrs4 owners | Approved |
| GitHub CLI | 49 | 45 | 52% | 12 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 89 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“It's easy to setup an interface that makes search a bit easier still”
“Combining the tmux popup with fzf creates a crazy opportunity of whats possible.”
“I always install fzf now, including the shell integrations like fuzzy history search bound to ctrl-r.”
“Fzf is no nice unless you trigger it on a dir too big”
“This is why I rip out spotlight on my mac and replace it with FZF”
“Those orchestrate fine, but they have no shared runtime and no shared language”
“The best upgrade to these kinds of git branch scripts is piping them to fzf.”
“I love this little fzf bash function that I wrote a few years ago”
“it's old, battle‑tested, and does one thing exceptionally well”
“That will get you CTRL-R (and a lot of other niceties) out of the box.”
“It's amazing the scripts your LLM can make you with, say, fd and fzf.”
“fzf can search through 100k entries easily without any delay”
“FZF is just a picker, but it has a ton of extensions.”
“Now I rely on standard input and standard output, and `fzf` for all the rest.”
“fzf lets you add multiple files from the find output at once, selectively”
“This is something I was missing in fzf”
“fzf can be used to build up almost any useful way of selecting things that you can imagine”
“fzf supports both refresh and piped input, so perhaps there's some ideas there that could be leveraged”
“I could write a few scripts with fzf (to helps with selection)”
“allows for fzf-ing my projects and creating a separate session for each one”
“cant imagine navigating a large fs without them now”
“call out to fzf and voila you have the perfect tool”
“You don't need aliases when you have fzf fuzzy history search with ctrl-r”
“Massively improves searching through history. It's worth the install just for that one feature.”
“upgrade your history search with fzf shell integration”
“add fzf + shell integration for maximum Ctrl+r goodness”
“It's less features but that's not necessarily a negative.”
“My one nod to modern tooling is using fzf for shell history search”
“rg, fzf, and several others that I can't think have proven to me that rust is the direction going forward”
“I cannot imagine going back to using a terminal without this.”
“for 50,000 rows I'd much rather just use fzf/nucleo/tv against json files”
“The tips in the article on enabling vi mode and fzf keybind are worth the read imho”
“shell function that uses fzf to parse the SQLite DB contents”
“where fzf doesn't seem to sync it all the time”
“Meanwhile, hitting Esc+C in the terminal (via fzf) it's totally effective.”
“instant fuzzy search on text file content so you can find”
“Polished interactivity is easy to build by just embedding a copy of fzf”
“apps like rofi, fzf and tilling-WMs like AwesomeWM and QTile”
“found the initial indexing to be a bit slower + add latency vs SQLite”
“fzf has greatly improved my terminal experience and I tend to incorporate it into almost every script”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.