Neovim for Beginners — Fuzzy File Search (Part 1)

File searching in Neovim, with and without plugins.

Neovim for Beginners — Fuzzy File Search

Efficient file navigation and searching are essential for developers. We are going to

• Understand existing Neovim features to help us find files efficiently.
• Configure options to help us find files efficiently without plugins.
• Configure fuzzy file finder plugins — fzf.vim and fzf-lua.
• Share other fuzzy finder plugins you can explore.

In later articles, we shall look into other Lua-based plugins liketelescope.nvim.

This article is part of the Neovim for Beginners series.

The Neovim configuration files can be found in this repository.

Built-in File Searching

Default File Search

Type :set path? and we can see the value of the file search path. By default, its value is set to .,/usr/include,,.

This is a list of directories that will be searched when using the gf, [f, ]f,^Wf, :find, :sfind, :tabfind and other commands provided that the file being searched for has a relative path (not starting with /, ./ or ../). The directories in the pathoption may be relative or absolute.