Open files in emacs by filename instead of complete path

directoryemacsfilenames

Assume I have a bunch of directories and can guarantee that no two directories have a common filename (i.e. if foo/bar exists, then bar doesn't exist in any of the other directories). How can I setup emacs such that, given a hard-coded list in .emacs of the directories to search, I can tell it to open bar and it figures out that it's in foo rather than me needing to tell it foo/bar every time? It'd be even better if it handled name collisions somehow (e.g. a list of possible matches), but that's not mandatory as I'm certain in this case the directories have no filenames in common

Best Answer

As I write this, I discover ifind-mode, which looks spot on.

(setq workspace-dir "/path/to/dir1 /path/to/dir2")
(require 'ifind-mode)
;; maybe change `ifind-command' as well

Then type M-x ifind-mode to find a file in the specified directories (and subdirectories by default), with nifty completion.

What I usually do is e **/bar from zsh (where e is an alias for emacsclient). But that's disruptive if you're in Emacs already. Also, if there's a specific file I edit often, I leave it open (and I save my session).

Out of the box, you can run M-x find-dired and specify arguments to find. But that's clumsy, at least for the case when you have a single match. ifind makes this less clumsy.

ido has a bunch of features that may be useful, especially Use ido to find any file from the project.

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