Short Open

Most of the source files that I work on, follow this long_underscore_separated_names convention, and I hate to press TAB TAB TAB ...

When I know a file name, or am seeing it on console (with a previous ls), I want to be able to open a file (in the current directory) with as few keystrokes as possible.

I came up with this mini Perl script, which, when combined with shell aliases can be a real time saver. The same can be achieved with sed/awk or any other regex-well-supported languages, but Perl is my choice.

Aliases

Here are a few bash aliases that I use (which specify the editor I want to use, and the file extension):

    alias vc='~/short_open.pl vim c' 
    alias vh='~/short_open.pl vim h'
    alias vp='~/short_open.pl vim p[ly]'
    alias vy='~/short_open.pl vim yml'
    alias vd='~/short_open.pl vim diff'
    alias vs='~/short_open.pl vim sh'
    alias vl='~/short_open.pl vim l[ou][ga]'

Given a file like: my_lisp_parser.c, I can edit it, in vim with

    $ vc mlp
    or
    $ vc m l p

i.e, the first letters of the word. In case of ambiguity, say I had another file my_lex_parser.c (hypothetical), can run:

    $ vc m le p

With a small change in the regex, it can be made to work on CamelCase file names as well.