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Comment by daleharvey | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time watching people traditionally navigate filetrees and tabs

with emacs and ido-mode enabled I press Ctrl+X B to open a buffer, Ctrl+X F to open a file, I typically type 2 or 3 characters from the filename and emacs gives me a list of matches (with autocomplete), usually the first suggestion is correct and I press return to open the file.

I barely need to think while I do this, there is no visual clutter on my screen, and I can usually finish the before someone could take their hand from the keyboard to the mouse and move to the filetree

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In an ideal world, ido-mode would be the standard for any kind of selecting from a list. Drives me nuts that there are still people out there writing programs that only search by prefix, or that make you actually click the mouse!

Users of Visual Studio can get something similar using the Visual Assist plugin. Works across files in the project, interesting symbols in the project, or interesting symbols in the current file. Works as well as you'd expect - or, if you don't like Visual Studio, better.

Oddly enough, despite the title, the author of the post switched precisely to this, because the new config he found included the Cmd-T plugin, which mimics TextMate's Cmd-T functionality, which is basically what you're talking about here.

I was on the borderline between vim and emacs for a long time. I finally ended up with emacs because it handles editing multiple files and switching between them way better than vim in its default configuration. It also has a saner scripting language. Plus, I get a bunch of goodies, such as org-mode, RPN calculator and an integrated shell. Though I still start vim when I need to edit one or two files on a remote computer via ssh connection.

The (admittedly not as good) equivalent to ido-mode in vim is FuzzyFinder.

One of the biggest shortcomings of vim is the lack of a good ido-mode style file-opener. People seem to rave about command-t, although getting it set up on Windows proved too annoying for me.

FuzzyFinder is nice, but graphically it's a mess. Like everything else in vim, really.

This is the biggest meta-shortcoming of vim: the fact that it doesn't come with a built-in programming language. This forces extension authors to bring their own, with the expected consequences.

It has vimscript, but vimscript is at best emacs-lisp's inbred nephew who is just as old but huffs glue and has sex with chickens.

Actually, you can also use mzscheme, perl, python, ruby, and lua to script vim.

Indeed, but that's what the grandparent is saying—you need to bring your own language to the party.

I recently wrote something very similar to Emacs' ^xf for VIM. Sadly I haven't the time to work on it as much as I would like. For those who are interested: you can grab it at https://github.com/Bogdanp/quicksilver.vim .

sublimetext has that feature also, and that's one of the key features that I love about it.

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