Longest exact match

[gwww]

I have a directory, with three files in it.

astrolsp.lua
luasnip.lua
telescope.lua

Using default fzf parameters (--smart-case in particular) and the search string lsp, then luasnip.lua is first in the list. I thought astrolsp.lua would have been first because of the exact match of lsp.

If I rename astrolsp.lua to AstroLSP.lua then AstroLSP.lua is first in the list. I would not expect a file with uppercase letters to change the results.

I don't claim to understand all the options properly, but am I missing something?

[junegunn]

No, it's working as expected. fzf puts bonus points on the matching characters on special places, such as the start of the string, word boundaries, and camelCase boundaries. So exact matches can be ranked lower than "fuzzy" matches. This is based on the observation that most users start their queries with the initial letter, and they commonly expect fzf to perform an acronym search. For example, if you search for Microsoft Windows, you're more likely to type in something like micwi instead of icnd. And this strategy does work nicely in most common cases.

• In this example, winpty is an exact match for np, but fzf sees no_pprof to be a better match, because both n and p are some at the special places, and they are not too far away from each other.

If you only want exact matches, prefix your search term with a single-quote. i.e. 'lsp

• https://github.com/junegunn/fzf?tab=readme-ov-file#search-syntax

[gwww]

Thank you for the detailed reply, very appreciated!

I didn't ask in my original post because I ended up focusing on the differences between the two searches, but I was not looking for an exact match, I was thinking about longest match. It was longest match that got me on the path to ask this question.