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### 2.3 Flexible Matching

User Option: ido-enable-flex-matching

  If non-`nil`, Ido will do flexible string matching. Flexible matching means that if the entered string does not match any item, any item containing the entered characters in the given sequence will match.

If `ido-enable-flex-matching` is non-`nil`, Ido will do a more flexible matching (unless regexp matching is active) to find possible matches among the available buffer or file names if no matches are found using the normal prefix or substring matching.

The flexible matching implies that any item which simply contains all of the entered characters in the specified sequence will match.

For example, if you have four files `alpha`, `beta`, `gamma`, and `delta`, entering ‘`aa`’ will match `alpha` and `gamma`, while ‘`ea`’ matches `beta` and `delta`. If prefix matching is also active, ‘`aa`’ only matches `alpha`, while ‘`ea`’ does not match any files.