Prior to my new Macbook Pro, I was an avid Quicksilver user. These days I use Spotlight exclusively. I was exuberant to find a similar solution for Emacs. The past few days I’ve been using Anything.el and Anything-Config.el and it has made my Emacs life much easier. It does things I couldn’t achieve with Vim and using the two together is like Quicksilver for emacs.
Go get the sources I linked to above and add them to your Emacs path. Enter M-x anything [RET] and you will be prompted for a string to search, just like quicksilver. Using your arrow keys will navigate the results, tab gives you options to act on the result. Dive into the source for Anything-Config and you will see it extends the keyboard mappings for Anything giving you many more options.

I’ve found it extremely useful for searching files, launching a project in Dired and searching python tags; and I’m only a few days into it’s feature set.

There’s a very active community making some nice extensions and also a pretty nice looking plugin api for Anything.

I’ll try to do a screencast this weekend to show what Anything can do. No promises since I don’t consider myself good with them like some people I know.