Question

Is it possible to do searching in NERDTree window by the filenames and file content?

Answer 1

You can do /foo like in any other normal Vim window but you are limited to the text currently displayed in NERDTree: you cannot search non-expanded subdirectories or non-listed files.

Assuming you are at the root of your project, you can do the following to search the word foo in JavaScript files across your project:

:vim foo **/*.js | copen

Or the following if the “working directory” (:pwd) is not the root of your project:

:vim foo /path/to/project/**/* | copen

Note the ** (:help starstar) that makes the search recursive.

If you want to open app/views/foobar.php for editing, you can do:

:e **/foo<tab>

Well, there are many ways.

Accessing files/buffers or searching across a project are relatively straightforward with native commands but there are quite a lot of third party plugins to make it even faster and easier. Ctrl+P is my favorite file/buffer finder plugin but you should get comfortable with the basics before turning to plugins.