Well, the idea is that you're supposed to stay in search mode as long as possible, thereby avoiding the need to go into normal mode and select files mc-style. I

Well, the idea is that you're supposed to stay in search mode as long as possible, thereby avoiding the need to go into normal mode and select files mc-style. If you do that, then Lightning should be more efficient than tabtabbing because (1) you don't have to press tab to filter files and (2) after you have enough characters to uniquely identify your file/directory, instead of having to press <tab><enter>, you're actually already there. That said, this is not for everyone; I anticipate it being useful for about 20% of *nix programmers in 90% of their file-opening cases. I just submitted it because (1) I thought that the style of the tool might be interesting to some and (2) that 20% might really enjoy and benefit from having this.