ido-clever-match

An alternative matcher for ido-mode.

How it works

The matcher ranks the input against each item by class and then by some sub-metric within that class if applicable (length difference between the two strings in the case of substr, the cumulative distance of consecutive characters in the case of flex, whether the match was case-sensitive or not, etc.).

The match classes are:

exact

Exact matches score the highest and they require an exact string match.

prefix

Prefix matches score second highest. They are treated as a special case of substring matches and will always rank higher. This class differentiates between sub-matches by comparing the length of the input and each match: the closer the two numbers are, the higher the score will be.

substring

Substring matches score third highest. This class differentiates between sub-matches in the same way that prefix matches do with an additional check on the distance between the beginning of the string and the first occurrence of the text within that string: the further away the substring is from the beginning of the string, the lower it will score.

flex

Flex matches score lowest. This class differentiates between sub-matches by computing the cumulative distance of consecutive characters: the higher that distance is, the lower the score.

Gotchas

The matcher does not apply sub-metrics to strings longer than 512 characters. That is, within a single class, all strings over 512 characters are going to give the same score.

The matcher relies on heavy caching and might take up a lot of memory.

You might need to bump your GC threshold.

Usage

To try it out simply run:

M-x ido-clever-match-enable RET

You can turn it off with:

M-x ido-clever-match-disable RET

To add it to your config:

(require 'ido-clever-match)
(ido-clever-match-enable)