FuzzyFinder

Posted on October 12, 2007

FuzzyFinder is a useful Vim extension that I've discovered recently (nothing to do with Fuzzyman). It has proven to be a great productivity enhancer, especially when dealing with large codebases with many files.

FuzzyFinder provides a mechanism to search through files on disk or Vim buffers using fuzzy filename matching. When activated it interactively searches the current directory for files matching the name you entered. Matching is very loose, so if for example you enter "abc", you'll get a list of all files matching *a*b*c*. It sounds strange at first but is very effective in practice.

Here's a screen shot of FuzzyFinder when first activated. A list of all files in the current directory is displayed.

The arrow keys can be used to make a selection from the list (useful if you can see what you want). If the list is long, start filtering!

This screenshot shows what happens after a few characters have been entered. The list of available choices is filtered to match. Very powerful.

FuzzyFinder can also do recursive matching using the ** wildcard. This is great for large source code trees.