MRmr_november·Apr 13, 2016
Not a real answer to your question, but for the last number of years I've been using Command-t (https://github.com/wincent/command-t) and after the initial index operation, it's super quick.
In Vim 8.0 is comingwincent
command-t
Lua2010–2016
wincent / command-t
command-t
⌨️ Fast file navigation for Neovim and Vim
10Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
⌨️ Fast file navigation for Neovim and Vim
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:04:58 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year10 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2010-03-25 21:55:17 UTC to 2016-04-13 16:40:48 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
10 sourcesI actually don't typically like endlessly tweaking my software either. I was prepared to do this with vim only because a text editor is such a key tool for a developer that it justifies the outlay of time. In addition, I wanted an editor that was available on any platform, and in a shell. It's true that vim under someone else's login will behave differently, but that's not a common case for me.
Command-T can be found here:
https://github.com/wincent/Command-T
In Just Use Sublime TextI've tried Sublime Text several times, but each time I went back to Vim. The Vintage plugin just does not cut it for me; there're too many things that Vim does, that Sublime cannot do. I couldn't live with EasyMotion, RelativeNumber, the fantastic split window support, Gundo (Undo Tree), and much more.
Regarding the plugins he mentions, I see nothing special, all of that is also available as Vim plugins:
5. Vim Compatibility (Obviously in there)
4. Keybindings in JSON are indeed nice, though imap / and friends in Vimrc are ok, too. Using Vim+Python, one can also write Vim plugins in Python (import vim).
3. Vundle (https://github.com/gmarik/vundle) is a fantastic package manager and reads GitHub repositories likehttps://github.com/vim-scripts. Adding a new package is as simple as doing
:Bundle 'vim-scripts/YankRing.vim'
:BundleInstall
or :
Read the rest
BundleSearch foo to find what's available.
The listed plugins:
Git -> try Fugitive.vim it is awesome
Emmett -> Also available for Vim
SublimeLinter -> Syntastic
SublimeCodeIntel -> Clang Complete
2. Vim has built-in support for sessions via the :mksession command. Or, just use the session.vim (https://github.com/xolox/vim-session) plugin, because it makes it even easier.
1. There's CommandT (https://github.com/wincent/Command-T), CtrlP (https://github.com/kien/ctrlp.vim), Waldo (https://github.com/jtaby/Waldo), FuzzyFinder (https://github.com/vim-scripts/FuzzyFinder). And most offer much more functionality than just file, directory, or buffer search.
I recently made the switch from Xcode to Vim (I mostly do Objective-C these days) by getting Clang Complete running (http://appventure.me/2013/01/use-vim-as-xcode-alternative-io...) so that I can use Vim full time and not only for web and python stuff. I couldn't be happier.
Command-T gives you similar functionality in Vim. It's great.
https://github.com/wincent/Command-T
In Sublime Text 2.0 Releasedhttps://github.com/wincent/Command-T
Is also quite good.
It would cool to have a performance comparison
In Ctrl-P for Vim: Pure Vimscript Command-TI think vintage mode in sublime text 2 offers vim like keybindings as well.
As for browsing for files using the keyboard, I'm a huge fan of Command-T. https://github.com/wincent/Command-T
In Poll: Which text editor do you use daily?I dunno, Command-T was a pretty big boon to my productivity (https://github.com/wincent/Command-T).
In Vim anti-patternsCommand-T is a pretty popular new plugin for selecting files in and below your current directory; it makes heavy use of the Ruby interface.
http://github.com/wincent/Command-T
It also uses a small C extension to Ruby for speed, because for this particular scenario Ruby is a bit too slow to be comfortable.
Since Lua is so lightweight and fast, I think it should be an alternative worth considering in situations like this one, since it offers a reasonable compromise between the speed of C and the comfort of a high-level language like Ruby or Python.
In Vim gets support Lua and the latest versions of Perl and PythonCommand-T is a relatively new Vim plugin that does fuzzy matching on the entire path, giving greater weight to characters immediately following slashes or other word separators in the pathname. I've been using it for a few days now and can attest that it is extremely fast and seems to "know" exactly which file I want after just a few keystrokes.
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3025 | http://github.com/wincent/Command-T
In Am I the Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files?