One of the most unknown, yet most useful feature of MonoDevelop is the Go to File dialog. This dialog can be quickly opened by pressing Alt + Shift + O, and it can be used to quickly find and open a file of the project.

Some weeks ago I did several performance improvements, and introduced support for acronym matching. The filtering algorithm tries to find the best match, not only by searching substrings, but also by splitting the search string in several parts and trying to match them through all the words that compose the string being checked. This is an example:



When filtering files, the algorithm tries to match the file name, and if it fails, then it tries to match the whole file path. This allows filtering by directory. Following the example, if I type 'xml/ccomdata', it will fill find results under the MonoDevelop.XmlEditor.Completion directory. When there are several files with the same name, the list shows the parent directory name next to the file (inside brackets), so you can decide which one is the good one. Besides filtering, the dialog automatically highlights what it considers the best match.

After several weeks of use, I'm very happy about how the matching algorithm is working. Most of the time it manages to highlight the file I'm looking for by just typing 3 or 4 letters.

BTW, the same dialog supports searching by type name, using the same algorithm. In this case the shortcut is Control+Shift+T.