It looks like I have a great place to land if fzf ever starts to make my life difficult. Thank you!

I’m annoyed when things don’t work. I’m even more annoyed when something can’t be made to work.

I find the first kind of annoyance much more ephemeral.

I use copyq for this purpose. It doesn’t do exactly what you’ve asked for, but it solves a very similar underlying problem.

This is the reason I liked kakoune right away after I started using it: select, then act, and every movement is also a selection.

I adopted ranger as my file manager and there is a way to enable preview that works for text files, PDFs, and images (plugin). It’s not Quick Look, but you might not hate it.

I like it primarily for reasons of using the keyboard to navigate, search, copy, move, delete, and open files. It helped me miss Alfred less.

Someone else has mentioned nnn, which has similar aims.