Sorting FZF results in Vim by proximity to current buffer

I work in a large monorepo, and I was pretty sick of typing my team’s project directory whenever I wanted to use fzf.vim to search for and open another file.

Enter proximity-sort. This tool will sort a list of files by the proximity to a given file.

Installing proximity-sort #

You’ll need Rust if you don’t have it:

brew install rustup
rustup-init -y
source $HOME/.cargo/env

# add Rust's cargo bin directory to your $PATH
echo '[ -f $HOME/.cargo/env ] && source $HOME/.cargo/env' > \
  ~/.bashrc  # or ~/.zshrc, etc

Once you have Rust on your system, you just need:

cargo install proximity-sort

It’s not bad to use: you just pipe a list of files into it, and give it a target file to bias search results around. Something like:

$ rg --files | proximity-sort lib/project/current/file.rb

and proximity-sort will reorder the search results based on distance to lib/project/current. Give it a try manually in your shell first so you can understand how the output changes as a result.

Configuring vim #

You can add a function to give FZF the file list. When you’re in the root directory, it will just use rg --files. When you’re in a buffer containing a file in a sub-directory, it will use that sub-directory to proximity sort.

function! g:FzfFilesSource()
  let l:base = fnamemodify(expand('%'), ':h:.:S')
  let l:proximity_sort_path = $HOME . '/.cargo/bin/proximity-sort'

  if base == '.'
    return 'rg --files'
  else
    return printf('rg --files | %s %s', l:proximity_sort_path, expand('%'))
  endif
endfunction

The final thing you have to do is update your FZF shortcut to use the function. Mine looks like this:

" ctrl p brings up the file finder
noremap <C-p> :call fzf#vim#files('', {
      \ 'source': g:FzfFilesSource(),
      \ 'options': '--tiebreak=index'})<CR>

Reload your Vim config and try it out!