If you’re the same felix as the comment author of the following comment, then it seems you meant to suggest it, but never did:
LaunchBar style file opening ! You are a god ! I was going to suggest this as a feature. You have saved us thousands of boring hours clicking on triangles.
The feature in LaunchBar was btw an evolution of the LaunchBar author having a dozen shell scripts (or aliases) a la “ps=open -a PhotoShop” that he called from a terminal to quickly open his various applications and then later realized it could be automated.
He wrote command t and then when I tried it I suggested doing the multi word matching trick. To the best of my memory, could be misremembering. i had some back and forth with him about it and he revised it to its current state.
I was talking with someone on #vim about the history of that feature a few days ago. I traced it back to either Launchbar or Quicksilver and I'm glad I wasn't that far off the mark.
As a side note, it's somehow funny how a sentence like "Sublime Text Ctrl+P Like Fuzzy Matching" can tell quite a lot about the person who writes it. I'm not criticizing, of course, but well… I find it funny. That's all.
I implemented something very similar in perl a few weeks back for my user interfaces project; I wrote a desktop search client that would take a query from the user and score results based on how many and how well it matches a series of different interpretations of the query (fuzzy was one of them).
I too am really amazed this isn't more prevalent as it is so easy to do, after discovering the vim ctrl-p [1] plugin I rarely go a day without using it.
I added similar functionality to my editor about 5 years ago after seeing a coworker use Sublime Text. I'm amazed that all editors don't have it already.
It's sort-of abandoned in that I've had a user-submitted patch to fix a major bug since last October, but I haven't had the time to review and apply it yet. I wouldn't suggest anyone use it at this point (I only do because it is exactly what I want; no more, no less), and usually point people to use Eric4 or Eric5, depending on whether you are focused on Python 2.x or Python 3.x .
I think I know who removed the Scroll Lock from our keyboards. Meet me by the service entrance to the 69th Regiment Armory, no questions asked. We'll trebuchet that little devil to Siam.
AFAIK Sublime, Ctrl-P and friends all followed and improved from TextMate's version.
It was originally a feature in LaunchBar which was on NextStep and was ported to OS X [1] QuickSilver and Spotlight were also influenced by LaunchBar.
[1] http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/legacy.html