[caenn]

If you used Ranger in your vim days it's also available in emacs. Projectile when inside a git repo also has a lot of good stuff for navigation, see projective-find-file and other fn from the package.

I will leave this here for the small set of people that use both emacs and windows. The 'everything' extension for emacs is really great, instant HD(s) wide file/folder search. If you don't have Everything.exe installed on your windows machine i'd urge you to go try it. (with or without emacs) As far as emacs integration this is what I use for it. The 2nd function requires the projectile and perspective extensions, it opens a new virtual-desktop-thing inside emacs.

  (if (eq system-type 'windows-nt)
    (use-package everything
      :config
      (setq everything-cmd "C:\\Program Files\\Everything\\es.exe")
      (setq everything-ffap-integration nil)))

  (defun open-file-from-anywhere ()
  (interactive)
  (everything))

  (defun open-file-from-anywhere-in-new-persp-if-in-project ()
  (interactive)
  (let* ((fpath (everything-find-prompt))
         (f-projectile-root (projectile-project-root fpath))
         (project-name (projectile-project-name f-projectile-root)))
    (if f-projectile-root
        (progn
          (persp-switch project-name)
          (find-file fpath))
      (progn
        (message "File is not in a valid project directory")
        (find-file fpath)))))