bb-fzf: A Babashka Tasks Picker
This post introduces a Babashka Tasks helper I put together make it easier to use bb tasks interactively. Here's the bb-fzf repo link.
The main things the helper adds are:
- the use of fzf for fuzzy task selection to help you type less
- the ability to invoke bb tasks from any sub-directory in your repo
- a bit of pretty-printing with the help of Bling
Babashka and fzf are two tools that are consistently part of my workflow, regardless of what I'm doing. I've briefly wrote about them in my previous post, PhuzQL: A GraphQL Fuzzy Finder, where I combined them together with Pathom to create a simple GraphQL explorer. In short, Babashka lets you write Clojure scripts with a fast startup time and fzf is an interactive picker with fuzzy text matching to save you some keystrokes.
Babashka includes a tasks feature that is somewhat like a Makefile replacement, allowing you to define named tasks in a bb.edn file and then execute them with bb <task name> [optional params]. bb-fzf just lets you pick from your list of tasks interactively - think of it as an ergonomic autocomplete.
A quick demo showing:
- simple task selection
- argument support
- output formatting (callouts, color, task selection, repo root)
Check out the README in the bb-fzf repo for more details on installation and usage. There's always room for improvement, but this is sufficient for my needs for now. In the future I might add a preview window and more robust argument handling with the help of babashka.cli.
Issues and PRs in the repo are welcome.
Published: 2025-04-03