Building fzf

Build instructions

Prerequisites

go executable in $PATH

Using Makefile

Makefile will set up and use its own $GOPATH under the project root.

# Source files are located in src directory
cd src

# Build fzf binary for your platform in src/fzf
make

# Build fzf binary and copy it to bin directory
make install

# Build 32-bit and 64-bit executables and tarballs
make release

# Build executables and tarballs for Linux using Docker
make linux

Using `go get`

Alternatively, you can build fzf directly with go get command without cloning the repository.

go get -u github.com/junegunn/fzf/src/fzf

Build options

With ncurses 6

The official binaries of fzf are built with ncurses 5 because it's widely supported by different platforms. However ncurses 5 is old and has a number of limitations.

Does not support more than 256 color pairs (See 357)
Does not support italics
Does not support 24-bit color

But you can manually build fzf with ncurses 6 to overcome some of these limitations. ncurses 6 supports up to 32767 color pairs (1), and supports italics (2). To build fzf with ncurses 6, you have to install it first. On macOS, you can use Homebrew to install it.

brew install homebrew/dupes/ncurses
LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/ncurses/lib" make install

With tcell

tcell is a portable alternative to ncurses and we currently use it to build Windows binaries. tcell has many benefits but most importantly, it supports 24-bit colors. To build fzf with tcell:

TAGS=tcell make install

However, note that tcell has its own issues.

Poor rendering performance compared to ncurses
Does not support bracketed-paste mode
Does not support italics unlike ncurses 6
Some wide characters are not correctly displayed

Third-party libraries used

ncurses
mattn/go-runewidth
- Licensed under MIT
mattn/go-shellwords
- Licensed under MIT
mattn/go-isatty
- Licensed under MIT
tcell
- Licensed under Apache License 2.0

License

MIT

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