FZF and Fish

June 3, 2025

This is my third day on my journey of making FZF work with Fish and NixOS. Well, it does work by default, but I had some special additional requirements—namely, that I can open files found by FZF in their default application and that I have a nice preview of images, PDFs, and just files in general when searching with FZF.

But whenever I fix one thing, another thing breaks. I’ve already reached at least three points where I thought to myself, “Finally, I’m done—only this tiny little thing left.” And then, after I fixed that tiny little thing, I was back at square one. Something else broke—either the preview stopped working, or it didn’t open the file correctly, or it didn’t close the terminal after opening the program, or pressing Enter didn’t work.

Anyway, I spent the whole day on this. When I say the whole day, I mean I started at 9 a.m., took a lunch and dinner break, and kept working on it until 11 p.m.

I came to this realization: I think I might be the Sisyphus of software development—forever developing software where, as soon as you fix one bug, another appears. A never-ending cycle with a never-working product. But honestly? I really don’t think that would be so bad. I was Dasein incarnate: no thoughts wandering off, fully focused on one task, just being.