Re: Interactively finding file in a list of directories

[Denis Bueno]

On 3/9/07, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
> > > For example, assume there are 4 different files all named "find.jsp"
> > > in different directories, and I would like to find a particular one. I
> > > would do M-x find-resource, type "find", hit TAB, it I would see a
> > > list that looks something like:
> >
> > There is an interface to the UNIX locate database (M-x locate RET
> > pattern RET). Regularly, once a day or once a weekly, the whole disk
> > is searched and all path names, files and directories, but no
> > "special files," are recorded in a database or hash file. The command
> > locate takes as argument a search pattern that allows a few
> > metacharacters and looks up this pattern in the database, so it's
> > much faster than find. Executing locate as a shell command, you could
> > filter a bit more with grep what locate returns ...
>
> The link I gave earlier provides info on several such Emacs interfaces to a
> UNIX or GNU/Linux `locate' database:
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/LocateFilesAnywhere.

Thanks. I've given up on rolling my own solution (indeed, the many
solutions I've seen thus far are much more feature-complete). I'm
current maintaining a filecache cache persistently -- using
instructions from the link above -- and that's working well.

Later I'll try to fix the only annoyances I've found -- I can't find
the scroll-in-the-reverse-direction counterpart to C-x TAB, and I'd
like to by able to find SomeFileName.java by typing So*F*.java. (I'm
not using icicles because I wanted a more lightweight solution, and
I'm not using GlobalFF because I'd like new files to show up more
often than the interval in which locate database is automatically
updated. I may yet  decide that these are stupid reasons not to use
these libraries.)

Thank you all for the help (both here and on emacs-devel, which was
admittedly the wrong list).

-Denis