How is file navigation in Sublime Text 2 so fast?

Question

In Sublime Text 2, one can simply launch the editor, drag a folder into it, and press Ctrl+P to pretty much instantly open any file in that folder. As far as I can see the number of files in the folder doesn't matter, and it doesn't seem to perform any indexing at all. To be clear, I'm not talking about the speed of opening a specific file, I'm talking about the filtering function available that lets you filter between all files in a folder to find the one you want. For example:

In comparison, both Vim and Emacs pretty much need some sort of index in order to find files fast (FindFile for Vim, Ctags or Cscope for Emacs). ST2, on the other hard, doesn't need anything, is faster than running "find" would be to recursively list all files in the directory, and what's even more amazing is that neither the CPU usage nor the RAM usage shoots up while it's running.

I'm just curious as to whether anyone has any ideas about how ST2 does this under the hood.

Answer 1

I believe Sublime Text 2 performs file scan on background when you open a folder / project. It's quiet about doing this. Various plug-ins do their own scans which are not that fast (like ctags). Internals regarding how ST2 does this are not documented or open.

Also it is not that fast, some people have issues with this: http://sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/49572-cache-folder-treegoto-anything-for-remote-volumes/

http://sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/49572-cache-folder-treegoto-anything-for-remote-volumes/