emacs find file in project on a big project

Question

In vim, there is this amazing plugin called command-t, that lets you fuzzy-search through all the files in your project. We have a fairly large rails app with a ton of files

Answer 1

Try https://github.com/technomancy/find-file-in-project which use GNU Find or BSD Find to find files. Nothing can beat the speed of C!

M-x find-file-in-project-by-selected is the only command you need use.

I tested with 50000+ files at some stone-aged netbook without any issue.

By default it uses efficient ivy-mode to filter the candidate and ido-mode as fallback. I tested ivy-mode with three million candidates. Now you get the idea that Emacs Lisp itself is quick enough.

At *nix, the kernel provides cache for find, so if you search the files with same input, the response is instant.

Besides, the ivy-mode automatically cache the last search results in Emacs lisp variable ivy-last, so you can M-x ivy-resume to get the previous candidates without bothering Find.

You can (setq my-cached-result ivy-last) to store ivy-last into another variable. Then you can M-x my-ivy-resume:

(defun my-ivy-resume ()
  (interactive)
  (let* ((ivy-last (if my-cached-result my-cached-result ivy-last))
         (default-directory (ffip-get-project-root-directory)))
    (ivy-resume)))

In this way you can store last 1000 results and re-use them ;)