Presumably a vim mode user would jump straight to `/` to filter, or i/a, or f{letter}, etc.

That was first thing I did - check if I can navigate vim style. However it has different philosophy. It has fuzzy search, so that you just type name of directory which you want to enter, it will be filtered out and hit enter. Now you can explore it.

A couple of programs substitue that with ctrl+[hjkl].