navigating through files and buffers with the lusty explorer

I think quite a few people are using ido-mode to navigate through files an
and buffers; we discussed it here already a long time ago. I am a happy
ido-user myself – it took me some time to fully get full accustomed to the
key bindings, but now it feels very natural. Definitely an improvement of my
emacs user experience.

However, I am always looking for new things – and one of those is a sort-of
ido-mode substitute. It's called the Lusty Explorer and it's the emacs
implementation of an existing vim-plugin. It's quite similar to ido-mode;
the difference is mainly that it shows all the files or buffers at the same
time, in the way that shells (say, bash or zsh) do auto-completion.

The best way to show how it works is using an screencast (note, this is of a
slightly older version). Lusty Explorer uses fuzzy matching; that means that
I can type /etc/fo, and all items in /etc/ with names f.*o match.

To install lusty-explorer, simply copy lusty-explorer.el to your
load-path, and put something like the following in your .emacs:0

(when (require 'lusty-explorer nil 'noerror)

  ;; overrride the normal file-opening, buffer switching
  (global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-f") 'lusty-file-explorer)
  (global-set-key (kbd "C-x b")   'lusty-buffer-explorer))

Side-note, the (when (require 'lusty-explorer nil 'noerror) ...) is there
just make sure that no error is raised when lusty-explorer is not found, and
the rest is ignored in that case. I use this construct for all packages that
are not necessarily available everywhere I use my .emacs; thus, they will
simply be ignored and not cause startup errors.

I've been using Lusty Explorer for about a week now, and I am quite happy with
it. I still need some time (and maybe some more customization) to get used to
the way it works - for example, I found the way ido-mode handles backspace a
bit smarter. Also, ido-mode can be customized to a much greater extent. That
might merely be a factor of the relative age of the packages – and I haven't
really felt the need to customize Lusty Explorer too much. For now, I think
I'm going to keep on using it. It's worth a try at least!