What's the traditional way to navigate a project

Question

Having just moved from textmate to vim I'm curious. To be able to navigate my project efficiently I've installed command-t and ack.vim. These both seem like relatively new projects in the history of vim. What do people traditionally do to move around a project when they work in vim, do they just use the file explorer or is there some old school trick I don't know about?

Answer 1

I set path properly then use find for most things. Sometimes I just rely on the tags. The tags allow tab-completion, but find does not.

in my vimrc:

set path=src/**;c:/work,scripts/**;c:/work

then

:find foobar.cpp

Will turn up foobar.cpp if it exists under a src/ folder somewhere around my current directory (recursing up to find it until c:/work is hit) and then check the scripts hierarchy.

:tag FooBar

just jumps me right to the definition of that class, as I use ctags to tag my C source code and I also wrote a script to generate tags for an in-house DSL.