Re: live search of files by substring

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Sam Halliday <sam.halliday@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> Many of the IDEs have a "live search" feature of files in a project, I was 
> wondering if Emacs had a similar thing?
>
> In many ways, find-name-dired is almost there. Live search basically
> is the same as find-name-dired except it lists responses as the user
> types in the query (and does substring matching rather than regex
> matching).
>
> It would be really ideal if such a tool asked for the directory to use
> based on first use, and then saved that until the user manually
> updates it. Even better if it respected .gitignore and other VCS
> ignore rules.
>
> Is there something similar to "live search" for Emacs?
>
> Best regards,
> Sam

There are several packages that do this sort of thing. For generalized
(ie non-project-specific) stuff there is ido, icicles, anything, helm...
Semantic/CEDET for project-based stuff (I'm sure there's more than just
that). You can check this wiki page for more:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryCompletion