I use ido mode. Here is how I set in .emacs
(require 'ido)
(setq ido-enable-flex-matching t)
(setq ido-everywhere t)
(ido-mode t)
When I open a file, I do C-x C-f my_file and if it doesn't exist in current directory, emacs will try to search for it in other recent used directories in about a second. However, most of the time I was just trying to create new files. I had to type the file name really fast and then C-j to confirm it. How can I stop ido from doing this?
I found an easy solution:
(setq ido-auto-merge-delay-time 9)
The time here is in seconds. I could set a very large number to completely disable this feature.