Exactly. To switch to a different buffer I don't pick it from a list, I just enter its name. Actually, thanks to iswitch, I only start typing a few characters

Exactly. To switch to a different buffer I don't pick it from a list, I just enter its name. Actually, thanks to iswitch, I only start typing a few characters that are unique to the buffer name. It's an incredably fast way of flicking between different buffers and it scales very well to a large number of files. Also, hippie-expand will expand to stuff contained in open buffers.