FiLe InteRacT, the file interaction tool for your command line

This is a small program that starts an interactive file selection process from your current pwd and allows you to select relative files, returning them to your command line once you are done.

Examples below invoke flirt with a keybinding set on ^s.

First example: interactive cd

Let’s say you would like to locate a directory, but you also want to grab information about the structure of the parent directories — a very common case during new code base exploration. A typical way is to do that with a fuzzy finder – many people use [fzf] with its c-t binding that opens a fuzzy picker to search for files:

cd ^t

However, this is not always wanted, especially when you do not know exactly what you are looking for, and are in exploration mode. Instead, you can start an interactive cd like so:

cd ^s

This will start flirt and will allow you to move around the filesystem. Once you have found the target directory, just end your interactive session (q by default) and you should have the path of the directory to go to in your cd command line.

Second example: interactive move

flirt expands all the selected paths on the command line, so you can use it for commands that expect several arguments. For instance, let’s say you would like to move a file from a directory into another one, without being entirely sure about the files you need to move nor where:

mv ^s

Third example: interactive tar creation

A more complex example is tarball creation. Write the static part of the command (tar -cvf tarball.tar.gz) and let flirt do the rest for you!