As regular Irreal denizens know, I’m a huge fan of the Ivy/Counsel/Swiper suite and consider it one of my two most important packages (along with Org mode, of course). If you aren’t already using it, you should stop what you’re doing and install it right now.
If you’re not decided, Michael Hunsinger has an excellent introduction and tutorial. It by no means covers everything the suite can do but it does show the basic operations, complete with animated gifs. If you want to whole picture, take a look at the Ivy User Manual. It shows all the shortcuts and explains the wonderful regex interface. If you’re an Ivy user and not familiar the alternative regex modes, be sure to take a look at the Completion Styles section of the manual. With the later versions of the suite you can change the method on-the-fly so, for example, if you want to search for several terms in any order, it’s easy to do.
Take a look at Hunsinger’s post and see if you aren’t convinced. Really, it will make your workflow much more efficient.