Odd behavior of fd (that affects consult-fd)

[ivanrg99]

fd --full-path --color=never is what consult-fd runs under the hood. This works great and is faster than using the find equivalent for most file switching cases in a project (plus it respects .gitignore!), and I suspect most people use it for file navigation (at least this is the case in the Neovim world).

However, fd --full-path has some weird and unintuitive behavior, where when --full-path is selected, fd will match on the whole path, not just relatively. This means in practice, that you might be inside a project several of directories deep in your filesystem, and use consult-fd to search for Foo, because you know that there is some subdir in your project that contains that dir or filename. However, if your absolute current working directory also includes Foo, you'll see that consult fails to match things on occasion. This is not a bug with consult! That's just how fd works.

This is pretty confusing, and is better documented here: sharkdp/fd#839
In fact @minad also noticed (sharkdp/fd#839 (comment)) ! I just found this out after writing this.

If you find yourself having these issues, like I did, you might find it better to use my fork of fd that gets rid of this behavior, or fork fd yourself (my fix is documented here: sharkdp/fd#839 (comment)). Then, you can just (setq consult-fd-args "your-fd-fork --full-path --color=never") !

I don't know if this a good place to post this (or maybe the wiki?), but I struggled with some weird consult-fd behavior sometimes and found it not documented anywhere, so I guess I'm posting it here as a first attempt to try to help people also struggling with this issue. But in conclusion, for anyone stumbling across this: it's not your consult that's broken, it's fd !

[minad]

Yes, the problem is sharkdp/fd#839. It should be fixed there - if you have time to lobby for a fix, I would appreciate that! Using a fork is no option for most people I guess, including myself.

[ivanrg99]

Yes, agreed. Just wanted to leave some kind of record on this repo so that people are aware of the fd issue