Facebook PathPicker

538 points by ben_hall 11 years ago | 162 comments

xxbondsxx 11 years ago |

Hey everyone, I'm in the main engineer on this project if anyone has questions.

Facebook has a large codebase, so naturally we have a lot of long filenames and paths. It's a pain to type these out by hand, so I'd see a lot of (new) engineers select the text with their mouse before pasting it into the command line.

This is pretty inefficient and I knew there had to be a better way, so a few of us started hacking on a set of python regexes and a curses UI. Before long we had a pretty simple / easy command line utility that sped up everyones' day.

After a while we realized this would probably be helpful to all, so we open sourced it today!

JohnBooty 11 years ago | |

Oh wow, thanks! I was just thinking about this today - how I'm always cut-and-pasting file paths from ag (silver surfer) results at the console.

One thing I noticed: FPP gets confused by filenames with multiple dots. If a file is named for example "dev_backup.ldif.gz", FPP thinks that "ldif.gz" is the entire file name.

xxbondsxx 11 years ago | | |

Yep, this is where our regexes start to fall short. Mind opening a github issue for this? We can likely add another option in our "fallback" regex, but it's a fine line to draw between overmatching and undermatching.

For instance, we currently match on "add/remove" output from git status which is less than fortunate. For performance reasons we don't actually go check if each of those files exists (since sometimes you want to pipe hundreds of results into fpp [EDIT: and are using an expandrive or network mount])

o_____________o 11 years ago | | |

Open all silver searcher "Foo" results in Sublime:

subl `ag -l Foo`

neikos 11 years ago | | |

I'm not sure you know, but just in case, ag also has a -l flag with which it will just spit out the filenames!

aristus 11 years ago | |

Good work! when I was at FB I rolled my own, called "gitsh":

https://gist.github.com/aristus/2304335

One of the most useful features is range selection syntax, eg, run git rm on items 4-16.

xxbondsxx 11 years ago | | |

Ah yes I remember this! I was always bad at typing out the numbers though. We support range selection as well, but it does require a keypress for each (which is less than ideal if you have a ton of entries).

Maybe we'll integrate some kind of line-number-selection-mode one day!

kbd 11 years ago | |

> so I'd see a lot of (new) engineers select the text with their mouse

What did the more experienced engineers do differently?

xxbondsxx 11 years ago | | |

A lot of the more experienced engineers had cooked up their own regexes / bash aliases / crazy combination of vim macros to handle the above, but everyone had their own one-off solution that was either hard to learn or hard to generalize. The demand was definitely there though which was part of what got us motivated to build something anyone could use and learn.

CGamesPlay 11 years ago | | |

When I was there, I would literally just never close files related to what I was working on. I had editor sessions lasting months so I didn't have to reopen all of my files.

umanwizard 11 years ago | |

Dude, this is awesome. I've often thought about making a tool that does exactly this, but put it on the back burner of my mind. Really cool to see someone else had the same idea, but went a step further to actually execute it :)

fredkelly 11 years ago | |

This looks very cool - thank you.

I've been using Pick by Thoughtbot [1] for the same purpose, but if I understand correctly fpp will automatically extract file paths from any command without me needing to chain in awk/grep ?

[1] https://robots.thoughtbot.com/announcing-pick

nightpool 11 years ago | | |

Yeah, that seems to be the idea. It has a bunch of regexes for parsing different kinds of outputs, and some fallback ones.

goatslacker 11 years ago | |

Hey - I was the person who used this tool the most while I was at FB. Thanks a bunch for open sourcing this I've been missing it.

UUMMUU 11 years ago | |

Very cool tool. Just curious as to why directories are not selectable. I did "ls | fpp" and everything got listed (directories and files) but only the files were selectable.

xxbondsxx 11 years ago | | |

Yeah, we don't match on directories since the regex would overmatch other results (we would basically have to match anything that is words with a slash). However if we added support for checking for file / directory existence we could definitely add support for that

Zolomon 11 years ago | |

I have been thinking about a more general tool that allows you to select text in different ways from some input, and either copy the selection into your paste ring or as fpp does.

I am still thinking about different selection modes and how the UI would work. Usually I see a need to either copy several full lines, or columns from a table like structure (rectangle selection) or from a regex.

Looks good so far!

fragmede 11 years ago | | |

urxvt supports URL highlighting, so I can just click on URLs in my terminal and they open in my web browser. It's extendable too, so pdf filenames can be made into links that open in your chosen pdf viewer. I see no reason why this couldn't be extended to arbitrary filenames in your chosen text editor.

BonoboBoner 11 years ago | |

Thank you for making the mouse a thing in a keyboard driven world. As someone who grew up with gaming and learned IT as a result I never was able to fully give up on the mouse during my daily workflows. I admire people who can use VIM etc only by keyboard, but my muscle memory just says: mouse.

Thanks for establishing something that embraces this.

stephengillie 11 years ago | | |

You sound like a Windows admin living in a Linux/BSD world.

I struggle to do everything with Powershell, but almost everything I do has a mouse input. I use a gaming mouse for system administration - a Razer Naga Epic with the 12 thumb buttons.

They're a 3x4 array; I bind them to:

  Row One
  1. F5
  2. Up arrow
  3. F2
  Row Two
  4. Left arrow
  5. Down arrow
  6. Right arrow
  Row Three
  7. Tab
  8. Delete
  9. Backspace
  Row Four
  10. Enter
  11. Spacebar
  12. ESC

I can do the work of 2-3 admins, and I'm faster than poorly-written scripts.

Kiro 11 years ago | | |

Just want to echo the dead comment:

ossreality 6 minutes ago [dead]

lol, what are you talking about, this isn't mouse-enabled?

jakejake 11 years ago | | |

I'm only slightly ashamed to admit I like using a mouse. I get that some people can work faster with all-keyboard controls. I use both. I also like GUIs for certain things. The only thing I don't like GUIs for is when there is some repetitive thing that I have to do 50 times a day and would require 3 or 4 clicks or menu selections - for those I'd always rather have a single command. Sometimes I make those into shell scripts that I can click with my mouse though!

gilini 11 years ago | | |

lol, someone's gonna be disappointed trying fpp for the first time

staz 11 years ago | |

Look pretty nice. Have you considered integrating fuzzy finding in it? Or making it cooperate with fzf?

GutenYe 11 years ago | |

How to install it in Linux?

pliny 11 years ago | | |

https://github.com/facebook/PathPicker/blob/master/README.md...

encoderer 11 years ago | |

Do you work on developer tools at FB or was this extra-curricular?

Splendor 11 years ago | |

This looks very useful. Thanks for sharing it.

akshayaurora 11 years ago | |

Not sure, how much I'm going to use this. But I just hate the name (or command) `fpp`. Why put Facebook in the name?

itsbits 11 years ago | |

do we need to open any specific mode in terminal for FPP?

xxbondsxx 11 years ago | | |

Don't think so itsbits -- we strip out color codes and it works just fine inside tmux, but let us know if you have any issues on GitHub!

FiloSottile 11 years ago |

One of the best little-known features of iTerm2 is Semantic History. Cmd-click on filenames and they will be opened by the default application (or you can configure an action to be performed). It's working directory aware and works great with all output. I connected it to Sublime and it even works with line numbers.

(Same works for URLs, with the default browser)

vcarl 11 years ago | |

Holy crap, that's amazing. I had no idea, thanks for spreading the word.

namuol 11 years ago | |

Wow I just posted about this[1] as some hypothetical "dream feature" but it already exists. I don't use iTerm2 (or OS X, for that matter), but I'm wondering now if other terminals support it in some way or another...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9508828

jonalmeida 11 years ago | | |

This exists in a few linux terminal shells. Notably, gnome-terminal.

tracker1 11 years ago | |

I wish that I could have iTerm2 for windows (where I use conemu) and Linux (guake has similar features, but an alien ui imho)... I tend to really like tabbed console sessions, and usually have a few local and ssh sessions open at a time while working.

biftek 11 years ago | |

Unfortunately using tmux breaks that behavior.

evanw 11 years ago | | |

I believe you can still achieve this with tmux by using Command+Option+Click.

kawsper 11 years ago | | |

I run tmux and I can CMD+Click hyperlinks and filereferences with linenumbers. I just upgraded to 2.0, maybe you could try that too.

fmela 11 years ago | |

Thanks! You made me very glad I came to the comments section.

ghuntley 11 years ago | |

Holy crap

kashifzaidi1 11 years ago | |

Kudos, never knew that!

TomNomNom 11 years ago |

I have a similar workflow already that may be of use to vim users. I pipe file lists (from grep etc) into vim (using a '-' to tell vim to read from stdin):

  grep -nri searchterm * | vim -

You can then use 'gF' over a file name to open the file in question (and be taken to the right line number if specified in the form somefile.txt:42). You can use '<c-w>gF' to open the file in a new tab, or '<c-w>F' to open the file in a split instead.

As an added bonus you can re-filter the file list from within vim to, for example, remove things from a test directory without having to run the original command again:

  :%!grep -v ^test

jstx 11 years ago | |

This is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.

fiatjaf 11 years ago |

Dozens of cool utilities like this are created every week and launched at Show HN, but without "Facebook" in their names you need at least 10 of them to get the many points this thread has gathered.

tsiki 11 years ago | |

Same goes for Google, but you could argue that it's for a reason. FB/Google have a reputation to uphold and they strive to make sure their name isn't associated with subpar stuff. Plus, they have a lot of brilliant developers to work on this stuff. In the end of the day, it's largely about knowing which of these cool utilities have a better chance of being usable and well thought-out, as nobody wants to spend time on figuring out a utility which turns out to be unusable.

stass 11 years ago | | |

> FB/Google have a reputation to uphold and they strive to make sure their name isn't associated with subpar stuff. Plus, they have a lot of brilliant developers to work on this stuff.

Why do you think so? My experience was quite the opposite... One can argue that large companies don't care about their reputation as much as small companies and individuals do as responsibility gets diluted among the larger number of people. This was certainly the case with most of the tech companies.

Dewie3 11 years ago | | |

> FB/Google have a reputation to uphold and they strive to make sure their name isn't associated with subpar stuff.

Have you seen the "google" group/whatever it's called on Github? A lot of the repos that are posted here have large disclaimers, or here in the comments, that the project is not associated with Google itself but rather by the particular employees that are working on it. So Google doesn't mind letting their employees put up repos of their misc "scratch their itch"/side-project/pet projects, it seems.

> Plus, they have a lot of brilliant developers to work on this stuff.

Someone works at Google/Facebook/... -> commence reflex fawning.

fiatjaf 11 years ago | | |

You are right. Thank you.

fiatjaf 11 years ago | |

Well, the numbers changed, now you'll not need at least 10 of them, but rather 20 or 30 of them.

climaxius 11 years ago |

A while back I wrote a similar tool in go to scratch my own itch and use it every day: https://github.com/robbiev/numberwang

alexsop2 11 years ago | |

🎉 That’s numberwang! 🎉

feedjoelpie 11 years ago | | |

http://louhuang.com/2048-numberwang/

ramses0 11 years ago | |

Me, similarly:

https://github.com/ramses0/bash-dialog

...depends on dialog command being installed, or you could use bash's built-in "select" command.

nathan_f77 11 years ago | |

Heh, me too: https://github.com/ndbroadbent/scm_breeze

616c 11 years ago | |

Surprisingly, I rarely see reference to that show the programming/IT world. That made my day, thanks.

michaelmior 11 years ago |

I use fzf[0] for similar purposes.

[0] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

xxbondsxx 11 years ago | |

Yeah fzf is great -- there are a few differences since PathPicker can execute any command with the selected file(s) (rather than just write it to stdout) and runs in tmux with no issues, but fzf has great vim integration and I believe actually verifies the file matches.

Glad more people are working in the productivity space though!

michaelmior 11 years ago | | |

I haven't really had issues with fzf in tmux. Personally I just write a couple of my own aliases on top of fzf and it works great. I have ^T bound to open fzf and then edit the file I pick in vim. For me I find that editing files and selecting files to add to my VCS are my two uses cases. The latter I solve with scm_breeze[0].

[0] https://github.com/ndbroadbent/scm_breeze

qiemem 11 years ago | | |

The fact that it just outputs to stdout means you can run any command with output from fzf as well. Just

anycommand $(fzf)

iopuy 11 years ago |

Hey guys, great tool. Just want to point out it doesn't play well with ack (a better grep) because ack does not prepend a "./" to the file list returned from "ack -l 'foo'". Any way to make it work with the following:

junk/foo/bar.txt

instead of just

./junk/foo/bar.txt

xxbondsxx 11 years ago | |

Hey @iopuy can you file an issue on github? For paths that are not absolute or relative (and thus ambiguous), we:

-- Try to detect the top-level version control directory -- Use that if one is found

But we could possibly pipe the current working directory into the python context from bash and go from there

iopuy 11 years ago | | |

Done. https://github.com/facebook/PathPicker/issues/63

slajax 11 years ago | |

Please, this!

stass 11 years ago |

This is a great tool.

However, he authors/documentation seem to be confused about bash vs shell. In the documentation these terms seems to be used interchangeably. In the code, the main script depends on bash directly (and for it to be installed in a very particular place) but does not seem to use any bash-specific features. However, the script it launches at the end is launched via "sh" which is not bash, so if there're bash specific features in it it would fail.

"PathPicker should work with most Bash environments" -- what does that even mean?

hodgesmr 11 years ago |

I see a lot of alternatives to this in the comments. Allow me to offer another: https://github.com/garybernhardt/selecta

philsnow 11 years ago | |

Yet another one: https://github.com/peco/peco

skeoh 11 years ago | | |

Oh wow, peco is really impressive. Thanks for the link!

sargegood 11 years ago | |

Love this one.

staunch 11 years ago |

Some people, when confronted with a command line problem, think "I know, I'll use my mouse." Now they have two problems.

I'm joking, and this looks neat, but the optimal solution is almost certainly to keep your hands on the keyboard while in the shell.

asmosoinio 11 years ago | |

And with this tool you do exactly that? Instead of selecting the filenames with your mouse, you keep hands on keyboard and select with arrow keys.

xxbondsxx 11 years ago | |

Couldn't agree more staunch! I silently weep every time I have to use the mouse during development

Retra 11 years ago | | |

Just turn that frown upside down. Use your mouse for all input and get rid of that pesky keyboard.

serve_yay 11 years ago | |

You're silly.

jlongster 11 years ago |

This is awesome. I wonder if any of this was Emacs inspired. A very common UX in Emacs is to list things in a buffer and directly manipulate the items to execute commands. For example, in dir-mode, you can select multiple files and rename them, or mark several files for deletion and execute it.

It really is a fantastic way to bring an interactive interface into a text-based world. This looks like a cool way to bring it to the terminal.

reedlaw 11 years ago | |

Yes, when I saw the git example I immediately thought of magit for Emacs which can also jump around files and commits from within git results.

Cacti 11 years ago | |

First thing this reminded me of was Helm in Emacs.

labianchin 11 years ago |

That is great!

But when using the command, it does not work with defined bash/zsh aliases. Anyone has any idea how to do that?

Say I have "alias g=git", when I use the command "g diff", the following error happens: .fbPager.sh: line 4: g: command not found

kentor 11 years ago | |

same problem here. need to make it aware of my aliases :\

ComputerGuru 11 years ago |

Is there a way of using this with instructions that take only one parameter, akin to xargs or parallel?

i.e. Instead of calling `command file1 file2 file3 ...` it would call `command file1; command file2; command file3; ...`?

jbnicolai 11 years ago |

I wrote a small snippet to integrate this with tmux. Simply press <Leader-i> for the current buffer to be run through fpp.

See a small example here: http://recordit.co/U2TYvbPC9p

And here's the corresponding code: https://github.com/jbnicolai/tmux/blob/master/.tmux.conf#L12...

sheldonk 11 years ago |

This reminds me of https://github.com/mooz/percol

xxbondsxx 11 years ago | |

Percol was actually a source of inspiration as well, but I got tired of typing things like:

git checkout $(git branch | percol)

Since I had to almost compose my command beforehand rather than decide once I saw the output. So we take the opposite approach. Great UI though!

pimlottc 11 years ago | | |

Does fpp support history for its command prompt? With the percol approach, you can easily re-run the same command with a different selection.

muaddirac 11 years ago |

Some of this is reminiscent of xiki: http://xiki.org/

pierrec 11 years ago |

Going though this thread, so far we have fpp, selecta, peco, percol, numberwang, fzf... Wewh! They are all, how could we call it, command line selector tools? What I'd love to read is a nice comparative review of these tools.

Although I kind of enjoy the process of going though each one and studying how the features fit my own workflow.

aerique 11 years ago | |

Like /u/Sbn, I'd like to hear about the experiences you've gathered with these tools so far. I'm in the process of choosing one of these tools and I cannot find a good overview of all their features, pros and cons.

Sbn 11 years ago | |

Well if you've gone through each then you're the best person to write a review! :-)

renata 11 years ago |

If you're only using this with git, I use git-number[1] for this purpose.

[1] https://github.com/holygeek/git-number

daliwali 11 years ago |

Is there a reason why this is named Facebook PathPicker instead of PathPicker? It seems that the original author is giving up rights of their software to Facebook (it says copyright Facebook right in the license).

What troubles me is that this tool seems completely unrelated to Facebook's business so why must they assert ownership of their employee's side project? On the other hand, it could be the author's intent to give up their rights to Facebook, which seems dumb, there's nothing the author could gain from that other than the Facebook brand in front.

AdamTReineke 11 years ago | |

They probably wrote it at work or on a company machine or discussed it on company time, all of which can make it company property. (Read up on moonlighting.)

encoderer 11 years ago | |

In the time it took you to write all that, you could've answered this question for yourself. He wrote it at work, as part of his job, at Facebook. And if he's not "troubled" by it, why are you?

0x0 11 years ago |

Looks nice. Is it better than the built-in "arrow-keys-browseable" menu completion of zsh? (Random "screenshot" available at http://www.masterzen.fr/2009/04/19/in-love-with-zsh-part-one... under "Menu selection")

I've always been wanting an integrated file picker on unix that was as efficient as the ones in the venerable 4DOS (and 4NT) shells.

namuol 11 years ago |

Related: It would be great if your terminal were just clever enough to identify paths and allow you to click on them to open them. Many do this for http:// links, but not fs links.

Bonus: include <line>:<column> in the path since most editors support jumping in the file with this format, which would make it much easier to navigate to a specific spot in your code where an error is occurring from the output of the error.

hellbanner 11 years ago |

Props for giving back.

barun 11 years ago |

This tool is awesome. It would be better if you add a search feature in the selector UI. I know that we could do that in the command itself but it would if helpful in case we forgot previously or need further filtering

Also, it is failing to select the entire file if there are spaces in it

thinkingfish 11 years ago |

Would be nice to allow filters- for example, leave out any results that match patterns in .gitignore.

serve_yay 11 years ago |

I don't use an editor that runs in the terminal so I only ever want a tool like this for the command mode. When you use it right it's pretty nice, but the first time I was unceremoniously dumped into vim. (Yes I know about the EDITOR variable)

scott_karana 11 years ago |

And in case anyone didn't know about something that does the same for URLs on-screen: here's urlview.

http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/urlview1.html

:-)

jiuren 11 years ago |

Impressive. I was very happy with percol. Now I see other possibility. I really like the "select first, then comes the command" approach.

I hope you can add support of selecting directories, and fuzzily filtering results(like what percol does).

hammerha 11 years ago |

There's a nice command line interface git client called `tig`. https://github.com/jonas/tig

ptman 11 years ago |

I like using vipe from moreutils ( https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ )

find . |vipe | xargs ...

milin 11 years ago |

Looks like it has issues running with nosetests. It would be awesome, if I could do nosetests runtests.py | fpp and if any test fails, i could select it and it would open it up in my editor.

trumbitta2 11 years ago |

Thanks for giving back!

I'm not sure how this would speed up my workflow more than a combination of tab completion, CTRL-R, and quick rushes of double-click-to-select-then-third-button-to-paste, though.

blago 11 years ago |

I use a combination of grep (to filter), awk (for projection), and xargs (to execute) to achieve similar result but it probably takes a little longer to construct.

ww520 11 years ago |

This looks awesome and very useful.

As an alternative, I usually just run ag to search files inside Emacs, and use Emacs to navigate the results.

liquidise 11 years ago |

iTerm2 has historic completion if you hit CMD + ; after typing a couple of characters. works wonders for path retrieval.

Sbn 11 years ago |

Tangential question- how does one manage these utils on multiple machines? I use dotfiles for regular dot files.

frou_dh 11 years ago |

Seems to trip up as soon as paths have spaces in them.

Nice concept though, makes a good companion for "mdfind" on OS X.

amelius 11 years ago |

This reminds me of Norton Commander :)

mortdeus 11 years ago |

The point of piping is that output shouldn't ever be as complicated as this...

raman325 11 years ago |

cool idea, thanks for sharing! for some reason, everything is working but the ability to move up and down, regardless of whether i use arrow keys or j/k. any ideas?

EDIT: should note i am using iTerm on a Mac

vikiomega9 11 years ago |

The brew install seems broken?

vecinu 11 years ago | |

Make sure you run a 'brew update' prior to 'brew install fpp'.

If that is not your issue then yes, I can't seem to symlink fpp properly in /bin either.

xxbondsxx 11 years ago | |

Yeah brew will need to be updated to pull down the latest recipes. I'll add this to our launch page

Cacti 11 years ago |

Reminds me of Helm in Emacs.

MetaMonk 11 years ago |

This is awesome! Thanks!

mscrivo 11 years ago |

very nice! Anyone get this working in an msysgit bash shell?

govilk 11 years ago |

Very useful. Thanks

manan19 11 years ago |

Why is this at the top of HN? :/

andyl 11 years ago |

This looks great. Is there a streamlined install for Ubuntu?

xxbondsxx 11 years ago | |

@andyl We are working on getting a linuxbrew recipe working. There's shouldn't be anything blocking this from working on linux systems (assuming Python 2.7 is installed).

In the meantime you can try the manual installation method listed in the README: https://github.com/facebook/pathpicker/

@itsbits Why do you say that? curious if you found anything

function_seven 11 years ago | | |

I just tried to git clone it with

    $ sudo git clone git@github.com:facebook/PathPicker.git
    Cloning into 'PathPicker'...
    Permission denied (publickey).
    fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
    
    Please make sure you have the correct access rights
    and the repository exists.

Any ideas? Thanks.

EDIT: Nevermind. It's an issue with using sudo to git. I can use my own account, but I can't do it in /usr/local.

rmc 11 years ago | | |

If it's pure python why not use pip?

dan15 11 years ago | | |

Why not actual Linux packages (DEB and RPM)?

itsbits 11 years ago | |

just went through their code. Currently not possible

numair 11 years ago |

Haven't we learned by now, my fellow HN readers? All of Facebook's open source "gifts" are patent Trojan horses. Go take a look at their PATENTS file before going anywhere near this stuff.

The fact that Facebook, at such a level of wealth and success, gets away with this stuff is despicable. It's also an insult to the great legacy of companies like Sun, which gave freely without strangling its beneficiaries. It says a lot about the culture and leadership at the company, but that's been well-documented...

If you're a passionate engineer at Facebook working on an open source project, please go work on it somewhere else!

superuser2 11 years ago | |

False. They fixed it about a month ago.

>Notwithstanding the foregoing, if Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates files a lawsuit alleging patent infringement against you in the first instance, and you respond by filing a patent infringement counterclaim in that lawsuit against that party that is unrelated to the Software, the license granted hereunder will not terminate under section (i) of this paragraph due to such counterclaim.

Source: https://github.com/facebook/PathPicker/blob/master/PATENTS

See also the announcement of the change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9356508

lstyls 11 years ago | |

Even if this was the case (this was poor wording in the original PATENTS which has since been fixed) you are only subject to these constraints in any code you provide that includes the source code. Since this is a shell tool, that is largely irrelevant. For the same reason, you can compile and release binaries from closed source binaries using gcc even though it is licensed under GPL.

Eduard 11 years ago | |

What is a patent Trojan horse? I just read the PATENTS file, but cannot think of a scenario that could affect me negatively. Can you give one?

mcintyre1994 11 years ago | | |

(IANAL, I did complain here about the old patents file)

An older version of their patents file used language that suggested to some that the license would be void if you attempted to defend against a patent suit from Facebook and it could therefore be dangerous to use.

They recently updated the file to clarify some terms, particularly the one the parent is complaining about, and I haven't heard anybody complaining about the new language.