Fuzzy-searching notes with fzf

I have a lot of plain text notes, from years of using org mode for nearly everything. Finding specific pieces of information in that sea of information can be difficult; I am unwilling and unable to remember where exactly I wrote something down. Of course, since it’s all plain text, grep/ag and friends seem ideally suited to the task – except that requires remembering exactly how the information was worded. Also too much. What about fuzzy search?

The ideal solution would be full-text fuzzy search that recursively examines all files in a directory, following symlinks. Then I can symlink every place I put my notes to one location, and point it there.

With emacs, as ever, there was a solution but a quick google search away: Deft. Deft provides a nice interface to incrementally (though not fuzzily) search a whole repository of text. I used it for a while, but as my notes grew more numerous and I less patient, its speed became a rather glaring annoyance. It got to the point where I manually guessed the location of notes rather than suffering its half-minute load time.

Yesterday a friend recommended fzf to me and within a few minutes I was wondering why I had wasted so much time before this. Along with fzf.el and a touch of elisp, I had a responsive, full-text fuzzy search that just works.

(use-package fzf
  :bind ("C-S-s" . ll/fzf/notes)

  :config
  (customize-set-variable 'fzf/args
                          "-x --color bw --print-query --delimiter=: --nth=3")
  (customize-set-variable 'fzf/executable
                          "/path/to/fzf")
  (defvar ll/fzf/notes-directory "/path/to/notes/directory")
  (defun ll/fzf/notes ()
    (interactive)
    (fzf/start ll/fzf/notes-directory
               "ag -f --nobreak --noheading .")))