fscache monitors files on your computer and allows you to quickly gather lists of them. Combined with fzf or ctrlp to get amazing mobility of your computer.

It works, but is rough around the edges.

CtrlP is amazing for jumping around a repo, but it really struggles with listing all the files to fuzzy search from. For a long time I had a bit of code in my ctrlp config that essentially boiled down to:

[ cwd -e $HOME ] && "echo can't run ctrlp from home".

This worked, and prevented me from locking up my VIM every time I had the misfortune of invoking it from the home directory. Combine this with git ls-files and I had a working solution.

That was until I started working in a monorepo with around 50k files. Even with git ls-files CtrlP was struggling. Enabling caching made it manageable but I was constantly struggling with the cache being out of date.

So fscache was born. Something that would monitor and maintain a cache. Then provide some tools for reading from it and quickly filtering it down to relevant data. This made working in the monorepo quick, and allowed me to hop around from my home directory.

Run starts the fscache server.

Read fetches data from the server for use with another tool.

Stop either shuts the server down or restarts it.

fscache can be used with VIM and CtrlP by using something like the following setting.

let g:ctrlp_user_command = {
  \   'types': {
  \     1: ['.git', 'fscache read -p %s']
  \   },
  \   'fallback': 'fscache read'
  \ }

To integrate with fzf-vim simply add the following to your vimrc.

let $FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND='fscache read -r'

fscache can be paired with FZF to make a nice and easy command for jumping around your computer.

function fzd() {
  local refresh="fscache read -d"

  if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
    local initial_query="-q $1"
  fi

  local dir=$(eval $refresh | fzf \
    --filepath-word \
    --bind='ctrl-t:next-history'\
    --bind='ctrl-r:previous-history'\
    --bind='ctrl-n:down' \
    --bind='ctrl-p:up' \
    --layout='reverse-list' \
    --tiebreak=length \
    --bind='change:first' \
    --header='Press F5 to reload' \
    --bind="f5:reload(${refresh})" \
    --history=$FZD_HISTORY $initial_query)

  if [ "$dir" != "" ];
  then
    pushd -q $dir
  fi
}