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cpsm

cpsm is a matcher for CtrlP. Although it supports all kinds of queries, it is highly optimized for file paths (and, to a lesser extent, similar strings like identifiers in source code).

Motivation

There are a lot of different way to manage multiple files in Vim. The goal of cpsm is to enable a particular one based on CtrlP:

  1. Completely forget about the current set of open buffers.

  2. When you want to open a file, invoke CtrlP and type - at most - a handful of immediately obvious letters in the file's name or path, like the beginning of its filename.

  3. Get immediate visual feedback from CtrlP as to whether or not it has correctly determined what file you want.

  4. Hit Enter to open the file you wanted in the current window.

To achieve this, cpsm needs to deliver:

  • high quality search results (at sufficiently high levels of quality, it's possible to enter a short query, hit Enter without needing to look at and mentally parse the top match, and have a reasonable amount of confidence that CtrlP/cpsm got your file right anyway)

  • with as little user input as possible (every keystroke matters because of how common switching between files is)

  • with as little latency as possible (to support scaling to very large, and especially very deeply nested, code bases with very long pathnames)

See the "Performance" section below for both search quality and time comparisons to other matchers.

Requirements

  • Vim 7.4, compiled with the +python flag.

  • A C++ compiler supporting C++11.

  • Boost (Ubuntu: package libboost-all-dev).

  • CMake (Ubuntu: package cmake).

  • Python headers (Ubuntu: package python-dev).

  • Optional, required for Unicode support: ICU (Ubuntu: package libicu-dev).

Installation

  1. Install cpsm using your favorite Vim package manager. For example, with Vundle, this consists of adding:

     Vundle 'nixprime/cpsm'

    to your vimrc and then running :PluginInstall from Vim.

  2. Build the Python module. On Linux, cd into ~/.vim/bundle/cpsm and run ./install.sh. Otherwise, peek inside install.sh and see what it does.

  3. Add:

     let g:ctrlp_match_func = {'match': 'cpsm#CtrlPMatch'}

    to your vimrc.

Options

  • To control how matched characters are highlighted, set

      let g:cpsm_highlight_mode = (highlight mode)

    Valid highlight modes are:

    • "none": Do not highlight any match characters.

    • "basic": Highlight the entire region between the leftmost and rightmost matched characters.

    • "detailed": Highlight each matched character.

    The default is "detailed". The highlight group used to highlight matched characters is "CtrlPMatch" (the same as for CtrlP's default matcher).

  • By default, cpsm will automatically detect the number of matcher threads based on the available hardware concurrency. To limit the number of threads that cpsm can use, add

      let g:cpsm_max_threads = (maximum number of threads)

    to your .vimrc.

  • To enable Unicode support, add

      let g:cpsm_unicode = 1

    to your .vimrc. Unicode support is currently very limited, and consists mostly of parsing input strings as UTF-8 and handling the case of non-ASCII letters correctly.

Performance

  • The matchers in this comparison:

  • All data is measured on Ubuntu 14.04, running in a VirtualBox VM in a Windows 7 host, on an Intel i5-4670K, with all 4 CPUs visible to the VM. Both the host and the guest are relatively quiescent while benchmarking.

  • The search corpus consists of the 48728 files in a clean Linux kernel source repository checked out at the v4.0 tag, as collected by running ag "" -i --nocolor --nogroup --hidden --ignore .git -g "".

  • For all CtrlP-based matchers, the match mode is "full-line" (the default) and the limit is 10 (also the default). ctrlp-cmatcher only uses the current filename to remove it from the list of candidate items; ctrlp-py-matcher doesn't use it at all; there doesn't seem to be a way to pass this information to fzf.

  • All times are averages over 100 runs. No timing information is available for the default CtrlP matcher or fzf because I can't figure out how to run either in a single-shot standalone configuration. (A quick search finds claims that ctrlp-cmatcher and ctrlp-py-matcher are both about an order of magnitude faster than the default matcher. YMMV.) cpsm times include both the default configuration (automatic selection of number of matcher threads) and with max_threads set to 1.

  • Results (given as the best match and the average time to return matches):

    • Query "", current file "":

      • cpsm: "Kbuild"; 4.802ms (14.483ms with 1 thread)

      • ctrlp: "security/keys/encrypted-keys/Makefile"

      • fzf: "COPYING"

      • All others: "security/capability.c" in roughly zero time

      • Only cpsm and fzf do any ranking; cpsm is falling back on the shortest filename in the closest directory to the current file (which is the repository's root), while fzf picks the lexicographically lowest filename in the root directory.

      • I think the default CtrlP matcher is returning a different result simply because it gets filenames in a slightly different order from ag (results for the default matcher are collected by actually running Vim, while the others use a precomputed list of items; "security/capability.c" is the first file ag returned in the precomputed list.)

    • Query "", current file "mm/memcontrol.c":

      • cpsm: "include/linux/memcontrol.h"; 4.683ms (13.964ms with 1 thread)

      • All others: same as above

      • "memcontrol" is a sufficiently unique prefix that cpsm returns (IMO) the best possible default result, "mm/memcontrol.c"'s corresponding header file, with no query entered whatsoever and with no special knowledge of the kernel's source layout.

      • It looks like the default CtrlP matcher doesn't use information about the currently open file either.

    • Query "", current file "kernel/signal.c":

      • cpsm: "include/asm-generic/signal.h"; 4.733ms (14.500ms with 1 thread)

      • All others: same as above

      • "signal" is a significantly more common prefix; cpsm doesn't get what I would consider the best match ("include/linux/signal.h") but it's impossible to choose between these two results without knowledge of the Linux kernel's source layout. (cpsm does pick that file as the second-best match.)

    • Query "x86/", current file "kernel/signal.c":

      • cpsm: "arch/x86/kernel/signal.c"; 5.762ms (20.883ms with 1 thread)

      • ctrlp-cmatcher: "arch/x86/Kbuild"; 25.034ms

      • ctrlp-py-matcher: "arch/x86/Kbuild"; 27.298ms

      • ctrlp: "tools/perf/arch/x86/util/tsc.h"

      • fzf: "Documentation/x86/early-microcode.txt"

      • Without using the current filename, there is nothing the other matchers can do to disambiguate the query.

    • The next set of cases simulate a user typing progressively more letters in a desired file's name ("include/linux/rcupdate.h"), when they happen to be in a different unrelated file.

    • Query "r", current file "kernel/signal.c":

      • cpsm: "kernel/range.c"; 7.128ms (23.512ms with 1 thread)

      • ctrlp-cmatcher: "README"; 19.825ms

      • ctrlp-py-matcher: "README"; 34.215ms

      • ctrlp: "security/keys/encrypted-keys/Makefile"

      • fzf: "CREDITS"

      • cpsm is much faster than either of the other two benchmarkable matchers with multithreading enabled, and competitive with ctrlp-cmatcher when locked to a single thread.

    • Query "rc", current file "kernel/signal.c":

      • cpsm: "kernel/rcu/rcu.h"; 7.612ms (26.283ms with 1 thread)

      • ctrlp-cmatcher: "arch/Kconfig"; 24.391ms

      • ctrlp-py-matcher: "fs/dlm/rcom.h"; 39.328ms

      • ctrlp: "security/capability.c"

      • fzf: "Documentation/circular-buffers.txt"

    • Query "rcu", current file "kernel/signal.c":

      • cpsm: "kernel/rcu/rcu.h"; 6.328ms (22.575ms with 1 thread)

      • ctrlp-cmatcher: "arch/um/Makefile"; 29.619ms

      • ctrlp-py-matcher: "kernel/rcu/rcu.h"; 37.312ms

      • ctrlp: "security/security.c"

      • fzf: "Documentation/circular-buffers.txt"

    • Query "rcup", current file "kernel/signal.c":

      • cpsm: "include/linux/rcupdate.h"; 6.167ms (22.162ms with 1 thread)

      • ctrlp-cmatcher: "kernel/rcu/update.c"; 31.301ms

      • ctrlp-py-matcher: "include/linux/rcupdate.h"; 37.560ms

      • ctrlp: "security/apparmor/include/path.h"

      • fzf: "Documentation/power/suspend-and-cpuhotplug.txt"

    • Skipping the rest of the letter-by-letter results, since cpsm and ctrlp-py-matcher have already "won":

      • ctrlp-cmatcher stays with "kernel/rcu/update.c" as its best match until the entire string "rcupdate.h" is used as the query.

      • ctrlp continues to return completely unrelated results for all of the top 10 until the query "rcupdate", when it suddenly gets the correct best match.

      • fzf switches to the correct best match after one more letter (query "rcupd").

License

This software is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.