Say I have a file in some obscure directory that I want to open and edit. I don't want to do something like this...

vim ~/foo/bar/blah/doh/ugh.txt

I'd rather be able to say find this file and open it. I know there are commands like locate and find to find a file or directory, but I'm not sure whether these can (or even should) be utilized in what I'm trying to do. Basically, what is the simplest way to open a file with a program w/o specifying its exact location? (In cases where there isn't another file with the same name in the entire system, and cases where there are multiple).