swiper VS fzf

I saw what was possible with emacs via systemcrafters: https://systemcrafters.net/emacs-from-scratch/

And I should note I have been using it for about 25 years, and was mostly in the dark about what it was capable of, though many of those years were in environments where I was using versions 5-10 years out of date, and completely locked down/out of things like melpa.

As far as keeping up with whats latest and greatest, I think the real answer is there isn't a good online resource. There are emacs meetups and conferences and some are virtual, and you can ask around other power users and see what they are doing. I even find emacs packages to be pretty poor at selling themselves on why you should use them.

As an example, Ivy and Counsel are kind of game changers to the UI, but I don't think you get any idea of that from their manual or main github page: https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper

This is a good improvement. Personally though I left isearch behind. For further search convenience / functionality I highly recommend swiper.

Next you "only" have to remember (elisp) function names. "Completion UIs" like ivy/counsel, icomplete, helm or vertico/consult, give you a nice auto completion list on M-x (choose the one of them, you like the most). Some of those Completion UIs will display existing keybindings and a short documentation for commands, near the auto complete candidates. So you will start to remember more keybindings without "learning sessions", just because invoking functions via keybindings is much faster (more convenient).

Proposal 4 (group-function). This one is an actual addition, which allows candidate gouping in the style of Helm. Note that it is a pure addition. Completion UIs and completion packages work perfectly fine without it. It wouldn't be difficult to add support to Ivy. I wrote the patch.

For the unfamiliar, Swiper is a part of Ivy which lets you search through your buffer with a preview of match candidates: you type some text you're looking for, and up pops a list of matching lines in the minibuffer that you can then use the arrow keys, C-n C-p etc. to scroll through and select the one you want.

When I started using Emacs I was following the setup outlined by System Crafters, which I still think is a really good introduction. But, over the last few months I've started to replace packages with more "minimalist" or "stripped down" packages. I've switched from Ivy and Counsel to Vertico and Consult, and recently I switched from company to corfu for auto-completion.

Ah, neat. I hadn't considered appending comments for searchability. I'm currently getting searchabiity from M-x dwim-... and ivy completion.

Please please stop spamming up arrow to find that command you ran. Instead you can make this so much simpler with fzf.

fzf – Fuzzy Finder is like a command-line version of Everything, an essential Windows search tool.

Shell: I use Zsh with zinit, Powerlevel10k, zoxide, and fzf. I still use a bunch of aliases for Git, Docker, package management, Jekyll, and local AI tools.

Once commands are saved somewhere, the next problem is finding things fast. That is where fzf earns its reputation.

If you use fzf, these functions become incredibly useful:

junegunn/fzf

fzf — command-line fuzzy finder

I tried atuin and then switched back to fzf[0]. It's less features but that's not necessarily a negative.

[0]https://github.com/junegunn/fzf