Turbocharge the CtrlP Vim plugin

The CtrlP plugin is a well-established fuzzy finder for the Vim editor. This plugin is most often used to quickly navigate to a file, within the current development tree, by simply typing letters that appear in the file name; CtrlP will take care of the fuzzy matching and display of those matches.

Being a mature plugin now CtrlP is not quite as cool as it used to be primarily due its poor performance with very large development trees, especially when compared with modern alternatives such as fzf. Transitioning over to fzf however is not quite seamless for those of us who occasionally dabble with GUI-based Vim’s such as gVim or MacVim; in both cases fzf will pop up a terminal window which can be distracting. Note, CtrlP does not do this.

This post is all about the middle ground, that being to still use CtrlP for fuzzy finding, but greatly improving its performance and also improving the quality of the match results.

UPDATE (DEC 2018): I now use fzf.vim instead of CtrlP as documented here. The fzf issue noted above no longer apply since Neovim & Vim both integrated a terminal.

Faster file listing using fd

The single biggest enhancement that can be done to improve CtrlP’s performance is to specify a fast external file lister. The fastest such tool I have encountered is fd.

It is quite easily installed using brew on macOS or Linux:

brew install fd

Then in your vimrc configure CtrlP to use fd when fuzzy file finding:

let g:ctrlp_user_command = 'fd --type f --color=never "" %s'

Since fd is usually so fast it is no longer necessary for CtrlP to cache results, actually it is better to turn CtrlP caching off since that will lead to mismatches as files come and go in your development tree:

let g:ctrlp_use_caching = 0

Better matches using cpsm

Another enhancement to improve CtrlP performance and quality is to use the cpsm CtrlP matcher. The cpsm plugin is a compiled Vim plugin for CtrlP with an emphasis on improving the ranked results CtrlP displays when fuzzy finding.

An example would be when editing a C file foobar.c, then hitting ctrl-p , immediately the first match will be foobar.h. When using CtrlP, without cpsm, the first match would just be the standard development tree order of files. The cpsm plugin makes switching to like-files extremely quick.

The cpsm plugin, by being a native compiled plugin, also claims to improve CtrlP performance.

However, being a native compiled plugin does complicate installation. Please make sure these prerequisites are installed on your machine.

On macOS:

brew install cmake python boost

On Linux (Debian flavoured):

sudo apt install cmake python-dev libboost-all-dev

Finally, install the cpsm plugin using your preferred Vim plugin manager. I like vim-plug since it allows compilation of the cpsm plugin directly without needing to cd (then compile) in the cpsm directory after installation. In vimrc:

Plug 'nixprime/cpsm' , { 'do' : 'env PY3=OFF ./install.sh' } let g:ctrlp_match_func = { 'match' : 'cpsm#CtrlPMatch' }

Don’t forget to do :PlugInstall when using vim-plug.

Note, the above cpsm Plug lines assumes a Python 2 installation, change to PY3=ON for Python 3 installations.

Fuzzy find functions in the current buffer

The ctrlp-funky plugin is a handy CtrlP extension that provides simple fuzzy function finding in the current buffer. It is a fast way to navigate to function definitions without needing to call on the services of ctags.

In vimrc using vim-plug:

Plug 'tacahiroy/ctrlp-funky' let g:ctrlp_funky_syntax_highlight = 1 nnoremap < Leader > f : CtrlPFunky < CR >

Note, use whatever mapping you desire to launch ctrlp-funky, here I am using <Leader>f .

Summary

The CtrlP plugin still has a place in the Vim world even with modern alternatives such as fzf available. However, it does take some configuration for CtrlP to shine as best it can.

Happy fuzzy finding!

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.