README-Win.md

Windows Known Issues and Limitations

As fzf-lua is bound by the same constraints, please read fzf's Windows Wiki page.

It took a lot of work to make everything work exactly as it does on *NIX/OSX. Fzf-lua attempts to overcome inherent fzf Windows woes (escaping, etc) by using our command proxy wrapper and working around the issues using lua code.

Single quotes in commands / options

On Windows, single quotes ' in command arguments are treated as a string literal, that means that wrapping arguments with single quotes does not translate into a single string the same way a double quoted argument is treated, i.e. 'foo bar' != "foo bar".

To avoid issues, make sure none of your cmd's rg_opts, fd_opts, preview, etc contains single hyphens that should be treated as quotes, this is probably the case if you copied old fzf-lua defaults into your setup options.

live_grep_native

When using live_grep_native we are sending the rg command directly to fzf (without the fzf-lua wrapper) and are therefore bound by fzf's escaping requirements.

For example, ^ is a special escape character on windows and also a regex special character. Say we wanted to search for all lines that start with "local", we would run:

-- we use `no_esc` to tell rg we're using a regex
:FzfLua live_grep no_esc=true search=^local

However, when using the native version we need to escape the caret twice:

:FzfLua live_grep no_esc=true search=^^local

More so, I couldn't find a way to send special regex chars [(|.*^$ as the backslash is always doubled by fzf's {q}_{^{* see bottom note}}.

For example, if we run:

break | fzf --ansi --disabled --bind="change:reload:rg --line-number --column --color=always {q}"

And try to search for the literal [ by typing \[, we get the error:

[Command failed: rg --line-number --column --color=always ^"\\[^"]

If we double the blackslashes by typing \\[ we get the error:

[Command failed: rg --line-number --column --color=always ^"\\\\[^"]

_{^{* upstream issue: junegunn/fzf#3626}}