How to abort fzf while retaining input?

[totoroot]

I use fzf, among other things, for searching for commands in my shell history and it's been great.

However, one thing I've never managed to configure, is to abort the search if I didn't find the command I was looking for, while still retaining input.

Preferably I would like to be able to retain what I've put in so far if there was no match, once I hit and if there was a match, but I'm not happy with it, abort fzf with some key combination like <Ctrl> + <C>and retain whatever I already wrote.

Currently in both cases the input just gets cleared once I abort fzf with <Ctrl> + <C>.

How should I go about configuring this? Any pointers towards a solution are welcome.

[LangLangBart]

Does the following work for you ?

export FZF_CTRL_R_OPTS='--bind "ctrl-c:transform:[[ $FZF_MATCH_COUNT -eq 0 ]] && echo print-query || echo abort"'

The fzf tool exports the environment variable FZF_MATCH_COUNT starting from version
0.46.0¹. We use this variable to check if there are any matches. If there aren't any, we print
the query. Otherwise, we abort the action.

The transform action was introduced in version 0.45.0². It allows the user to evaluate a
condition and then perform either action A or action B, depending on the result.

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Alternatives

Issue report #3528 is somewhat related to this topic. You might find it helpful, so please take a look.

Footnotes

1. CHANGELOG.md 0.46.0 ↩

2. CHANGELOG.md 0.45.0 ↩