Visual Assist does the Komodo thing in its file name and symbol selectors. It's excellent. I've never used any other search mechanism that's quite so good for very quickly narrowing down large lists to a handful of items.
(emacs users may be familiar with iswitchb, which can be operated in a similar manner. Entering space-separated strings in Visual Assist is equivalent to entering those same strings in iswitchb and then pressing C-SPC after each one to perform each search on the result of the previous one. This is marginally more fiddly, but the key part is being able to narrow the list down with one substring, and then add more substrings to further refine things.)
I've added a similar Visual Assist-/Komodo-style UI for finding things to a couple of programs I've worked on, basically copying exactly what Visual Assist does. The response is always positive.
It essentially compares the number of matching two letter pairs in strings.
I used it in a C# app that did a fuzzy instant search as the user typed more letters in. On a dataset of about six thousand names it performed really well, but it was a pretty simple app. I also used a javascript version on the same list to see how it performed on an X120e netbook, and again, it was instantaneous.
No idea how the performance would compare to the methods for common substring. I like the pairs matching because I can screw up letter positioning and accidentally type a letter or two that doesn't exist in the string, but still get back strongly matching results and usually find what I want. I used it because we had a huge issue at work with people brutalizing names they entered into our employee database.
Appreciate the heads up. Gave me much better terms to search for. Going to add them to the notes of my gist. I'm on vacation now, so I'll have to do more reading on it over the next few days
Also made a public gist for whoever is interested:
In ST3 for example, a space is basically treated like the regex /.*/
This means that if you type something you can only the filter results on the RHS of your input do far.
Consider: Models/player.js Controllers/player.js Views/player.js
If I type "play" then I need to hit home to filter further.
In Komodo, space is treated as a logical AND, which you can use to more effectively search the above.
I've not tried Zed yet, but if it can handle this case then that's a plus point from me.