Fzf: Key Bindings not working with Catalina

[NoLookForcePush]

• [x] I have read through the manual page (man fzf)
• [x] I have the latest version of fzf
• [x] I have searched through the existing issues

Info

• OS
  
  
  
  • [ ] Linux
  
  
  • [x] Mac OS X
  
  
  • [ ] Windows
  
  
  • [ ] Etc.
  
  
• Shell
  
  
  
  • [x] bash
  
  
  • [x] zsh
  
  
  • [ ] fish
  
  

Problem / Steps to reproduce

Keybindings do not seem to working on my Mac running Catalina. I have installed fzf with the following steps:

brew update
brew install fzf
/usr/local/opt/fzf/install
source ~/.bashrc

But ** yields nothing, and none of the keybings (Ex. CTRL-T) do anything either. I have tried source-ing the .bashrc from .bash_profile with no luck either. For reference, those files look like the following:

bash-3.2$ cat ~/.bashrc
[ -f ~/.fzf.bash ] && source ~/.fzf.bash
bash-3.2$ cat ~/.bash_profile
if [ -f $HOME/.bashrc ]; then
        source $HOME/.bashrc
fi

I have tried this same process with zsh (And .zshrc respectively), but no luck.

Any ideas?

[varagnac]

why not
cat ~/.fzf.bash and see what is there.

You don't need to source .bashrc in .bash_profile, it is a terrible practice. Please read the https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Environment_variables 'defining variables' section (even if you're in macOS it is all the same) and learn what your shells are doing. When sourcing anything.

[junegunn]

it is a terrible practice.

I disagree. It's a very common and practical solution for macOS users.

[NoLookForcePush]

@varagnac You might be on to something, considering ~/.fzf.bash isn't even on my computer. What should it's contents be? And should it have been installed automatically by brew? I've searched through the issues and documentation and I can't find and references to the file.

[yongrenjie]

@NoLookForcePush AFAIK that file should be created when you run /usr/local/opt/fzf/install.

FWIW (after following the installation instructions) I have a similar issue with **<Tab> not working on both bash-5.0.17 (Homebrew) as well as bash-3.2.57 (system). However, <Ctrl-T> works with both (after sourcing ~/.fzf.bash). And both **<Tab> and <Ctrl-T> do work on system zsh-5.7.1. I'm on macOS Catalina, although it feels like the issue may be the shell, not the OS.

My experience seems to be similar to this comment https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/issues/716#issuecomment-587164331, however I still can't get **<Tab> working even if I place

[ -f ~/.fzf.bash ] && source ~/.fzf.bash

as the last line of ~/.bash_profile, so the solution doesn't seem to work.

EDIT I managed to isolate the code in my .bash_profile that was causing it to not work, although truthfully I really don't understand why. It's this snippet I put in to fix tmux meddling with $PATH (https://superuser.com/a/583502):

if [ -f /etc/profile ]; then~~
    PATH=""
    source /etc/profile
fi

Commenting out those lines solved the problem. (Although it probably leads to tmux issues again.) An alternative solution that doesn't involve commenting that out is to prepend $HOME/.fzf/bin to $PATH at the end of .bash_profile, which I'm going to go with for now. Now looking forward to many more fuzzy searches 😃

Sorry, please ignore my additions; I can't reproduce it anymore. Think it was too late at night. Placing [ -f ~/.fzf.bash ] && source ~/.fzf.bash at the end of .bash_profile without any other $PATH meddling now works for me, so this is norepro. My apologies again and thank you for your work!

[NoLookForcePush]

@yongrenjie Thanks so much for spending so much time looking into this! Unfortunately, it still doesn't work. My setup looks like:

~/.bash_profile

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
  . ~/.bashrc
fi

# homebrew bash completion
[[ -r "/usr/local/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh" ]] && . "/usr/local/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh"

[ -f ~/.fzf.bash ] && source ~/.fzf.bash

~/.fzf.bash

# Setup fzf
# ---------
if [[ ! "$PATH" == */usr/local/opt/fzf/bin* ]]; then
  export PATH="${PATH:+${PATH}:}/usr/local/opt/fzf/bin"
fi

# Auto-completion
# ---------------
[[ $- == *i* ]] && source "/usr/local/opt/fzf/shell/completion.bash" 2> /dev/null

# Key bindings
# ------------
source "/usr/local/opt/fzf/shell/key-bindings.bash"

~/.bashrc

# [ -f ~/.fzf.bash ] && source ~/.fzf.bash

[junegunn]

You should be able to see the key bindings from the output of bind command like so:

$ bash --rcfile ~/.fzf.bash

bash-5.0$ bind -s
"\ec": " \C-b\C-k \C-u`__fzf_cd__`\e\C-e\er\C-m\C-y\C-h\e \C-y\ey\C-x\C-x\C-d"

bash-5.0$ bind -X
"\C-r": "__fzf_history__"
"\C-t": "fzf-file-widget"

[NoLookForcePush]

Unfortunately, none of these have helped. But I appreciate all the suggestions!

[dhunavdhuray]

This worked
In my case the .fzf.zsh file had the keybinding disabled, I had to enable them:

source "/home/$(whoami)/.fzf/shell/key-bindings.zsh"
[ -f ~/.fzf.zsh ] && source ~/.fzf.zsh

or try this with bash
Also
Paste above line in vi ~/.zshrc file and don't forget to run this command afterward source ~/.zshrc

[Aryan-dev007]

I was having same issue when I installed fzf with brew, install using git it will work for sure and
paste this [ -f ~/.fzf.bash ] && source ~/.fzf.bash
in your .bash_profile or zsh one.
First Uninstall fzf and then do this.
Use:
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.git ~/.fzf then
~/.fzf/install then
exit
Then close and reopen terminal and the commands should would work.

[eandrade21]

I can reproduce this 100% on Catalina
Installed fzf via homebrew
Manually ran /usr/local/Cellar/fzf/0.22.0/install script
Successfully created the ~/.fzf.bash and ~/.fzf.zsh files. Both are sourced in ~/.bashrc and ~/.zshrc
After opening and closing my terminal or manually sourcing the files, this still doesn't work.

My default bash is zsh and I have oh-my-zsh installed I wonder if this could be the root cause. Does anybody else has the same setup?

I switched to bash for troubleshooting completeness and the issue is still reproducible. Makes me think oh-my-zsh is not the culprit here.

[jhicks]

I ran into this issue randomly yesterday after messing around in my zshrc file. I tracked it down to having set -o vi after I sourced ~/.fzf.zsh. I fixed it by sourcing ~/.fzf.zsh after setting vi mode. I also confirmed replacing both manual vi setting and manual sourcing of fzf with the vi-mode and fzf oh-my-zsh plugins work.