Today I’ll follow-up on yesterday’s Selectrum article with a bit more details on how to submit the current input in ido (as opposed to the currently selected candidate).

There are 3 ways in which you can do this, depending on the underlying ido command:

  • if you’re using ido-find-file (e.g. you’ve pressed C-x C-f), then you can switch back to the regular find-file using C-f.
  • similarly if you’re using ido-switch-buffer (or something else to do with buffers), they you can switch back to the plain old switch-buffer using C-b.
  • regardless of the current ido command you can always use C-j (same as in Selectrum).

Here’s a small example:

ido_current_input_file.png

If I want to create a file named “blast” I can either type C-f to go back to the regular find-file command, or C-j to immediately submit the text that I’ve already written. I guess that in almost all situations using C-j is going to be the optimal course of action.

By the way, turns out that the built-in icomplete mode, also uses C-j for submitting the current input.