I haven't used Emacs much and thus don't really understand the question (a try to find a screencast that demonstrated something similar failed too). So feel free to provide more details. But maybe you're looking for one of these or can compare to them:
- Regexp search with
/
(do :set incsearch
to make it incremental).
- Regexp filtering with
=
.
- You could load all files in a sub-tree via
:!find *
(might not work on Windows, so maybe :tree
which will be available since the next version) and then do filtering among hem.
If it's something that involves fuzzy matching, then there is no such thing in vifm, at least not yet.