Improve history navigation experience

[SteveL-MSFT]

Perhaps a blend of menu complete and history searching, seems to be a common ask

Description of the new feature/enhancement

There are many cases where tab completion can result in a large list (not just files which is a common case, but think of resources in Azure). It would be useful to have either a new mode for MenuComplete or an alternate where you have a filter line that will dynamically filter results showing matches to the typed filter. In the file case, I should be able to type *.jpg which will filter out to just files with that extension. If I type jpg then any result that contains that string would be shown.

One question is whether the cmdlet participates as an optimization rather than filtering on the client.

[lzybkr]

Unless you meant for this to be a meta-issue - there are plenty of existing issues, e.g. #82, #120, #122, and #1074.

I couldn't find the issue quickly, but I also suggested displaying some sort of status indicator showing where you are in the history, e.g. 342/4096 or something like that. It might be confusing, but it might be helpful when you start to get lost.

[lzybkr]

fzf provides an nice history searching experience. Install fzf then in bash try Ctrl+r. It adds a couple other useful bindings as well.

Note the PowerShell module PSFzf enables this experience with PSReadLine.

This experience is much nicer on Linux or in wsl because it doesn't take over the entire screen. fzf on Windows doesn't seem to support this yet.

[SteveL-MSFT]

Fuzzy searching is something I wanted to enable as well, so we should definitely look at fzf.

[kelleyma49]

@lzybkr - 0.21.0 of fzf supports the --height option now. You'll need Windows 10 Anniversary Update or greater.

[lzybkr]

@kelleyma49 - thanks, I'm not sure when it was added but I noticed last week - and it makes a huge difference in usability.

[kelleyma49]

I had submitted a pull request back in 2018. It finally got merged in early March of this year.

I agree that it makes fzf much more usable. Let me know if you have any feature requests for PSFzf!