Before I go any further - just click on the 'this post' link above and watch the short movie the guy recorded. I'm lazy, I'm not going to make a video. Once you've watched the video you'll understand what we're talking about: an gosh-its-almost-like-its-an-IDE friendly way of finding files in your project.
Its the kind of thing that just has to be there for any programmer under 35 - we're just not going to fall in love with the :find and :grep and :vimgrep commands of the previous generation. Its just not easy enough. For some people the project plugin does the job. I admit, I kinda like it myself...but I always missed the easy file lookups you get in Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc etc etc. Being a Java guy mainly, I really love how easy Intellij makes it.
When TM2 expressed interested in making the final journey from emacs->textmate->vim, you better believe I was there to encourage him. When he complained that there just wasn't any good Command-T equivelant in Vim, you bet I looked around. I found the lookupfile plugin. At the time this was version 1.4 of the plugin - it was slow, it didn't do camel case searches (fuzzy finder doesn't do that either !?), you couldn't search inside files (ala grep).
I extended the plugin with my own version and tried to get TM2 to use it. Unfortunately my skillz aren't quite what they could be in vimscript. However I was able to get the following working (and hey, it still works!):
- I implemented searching using the standard unixy textutils and findutils packages underneath (find, sed, grep, xargs, etc). The first search is still slow b/c it builds up the search terms, but then they stay cached...so subsequent searches are blindingly fast.
- Compatibility with &path and &suffixesadd settings (the variables used by :find, :grep, etc). Basically you can setup &path/&suffixesadd and use :find, :grep, and your friendly lookupfile functions all interoperably. I setup mappings where I only searched say...java files; or java, xml and properties files; or ruby and xml and yaml. Complete control over which directories you search under, as well as their extensions.
- Support for case sensitive or non case sensitivity.
- Camel Case search. Not only can you do 'c*frog' to find 'CamelFrogMasterFactory.java' (or with case sensitivity 'C*Fro'), but you can do 'CFro' as well (a * is implied after each capital letter).
- Grep search: same way of searching (nice filtering list) but search the file contents as well. If it worked better, I'd maybe win that $100 bounty :).
since somone else has published their version, and I found it hella slow, I figure...hell, here's my effort as well. Maybe someone out there would like to pick up where I left off.
You can find the result of my efforts right over here. Now.To work.
