emacs-which-key VS helpful

Compare emacs-which-key vs helpful and see what are their differences.

emacs-which-key

Emacs package that displays available keybindings in popup (by justbur)

helpful

A better Emacs *help* buffer (by Wilfred)
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emacs-which-key helpful
37 34
1,673 1,057
- -
7.8 5.9
17 days ago 2 months ago
Emacs Lisp Emacs Lisp
GNU General Public License v3.0 only -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
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For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

emacs-which-key

Posts with mentions or reviews of emacs-which-key. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-20.

helpful

Posts with mentions or reviews of helpful. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-16.
  • Is doom emacs still actively maintained?
    4 projects | /r/emacs | 16 Jun 2023
    It tweaks Emacs GC. You can run M-x describe-variable while your cursor is at gc-cons-threshold to learn about it. If you opted-in for using "Vim bindings" (Evil mode), you can press K while in normal mode. Note that K doesn't run the describe- command in Doom, but it runs helpful-command from (https://github.com/Wilfred/helpful), which provides more context that describe- commands usually do.
  • Quickly learning some LISP basics for using emacs?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 27 Apr 2023
    The packages helpful and elisp-demos are super useful because they enhance Emacs' built-in documentation.
  • Is the official GNU Emacs up to date?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 27 Apr 2023
    You can try to actually use helpful for a while. There was also a package with examples, I don't remember the name, perhaps someone else knows which I mean, that shows usage of a function where available. I remember using it and found it very useful for a while when I was learning elisp more actively. I still use helpful sometimes.
  • Best emacs configs for Javascript and/or users who don't like to memorize keybindings?
    5 projects | /r/emacs | 24 Apr 2023
    Once you got the hang of keybindings, which-key is a helpful extension (aka package) to Emacs. At this stage, there are other helpful packages and keybindings.
  • Doom -> vanilla emacs 29
    8 projects | /r/emacs | 14 Apr 2023
    helpful for better help buffers
  • Emacs terminology
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 17 Mar 2023
    Since you seem interested, have a look at elisp-demos , too. It works in tandem with helpful.
  • Good short documentation for CL functions (etc.) available?
    5 projects | /r/Common_Lisp | 16 Mar 2023
    Elisp Docs are fantastic they have documented everything while with CL most documentation is missing or only on the Web. With Emacs, one need to learn about C-h f (describe-function), C-h k (describe-key), helpful.el and elisp-demos and a new world opens. Terminology is always different, simple example: Microsoft terminology sounds like bullshit, to a Unix person.
  • At long last it is now time to ask - how do you get Emacs to open a file in the current window?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 26 Jan 2023
    To find out what a key does, you can use the describe-key command, then press, for example, C-c C-o. I would highly recommend installing the helpful package, to get the even more useful helpful-key command. Then decide how you would like to modify or rebind the command that's bound there, because keybindings are generally not bound globally. In your case, I might rebind C-c C-o to one of the ffap commands. Further, emacs generally decides how a buffer is displayed based on it's filename or major mode. You can customize this through the display-buffer-alist: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/The-Zen-of-Buffer-Display.html
  • What packages do I need to for the best elisp editing environment?
    8 projects | /r/emacs | 6 Jan 2023
    Paredit, Speed-of-thought lisp, Helm, perhaps Lispy but I am not using it myself. I found expand-region to work really well when writing and modifying elisp. lisp-extra-font-lock if you want some more blink (and font-lock-studio). Helpful is very good to have instead of built-in help, it displays the source code by default as well as symbol properties. It is a very informative learning experience to see how built-in stuff is implemented. I am quite lazy to press extra in built-in help to see the source code, but with Helpful, you get it auto in the same window, whicih is great for learning. Seeing symbol properties is sometimes a time saver so you don't have to M-: and type an Elisp function to see the symbol properties when debugging. Learn Edebug, it is very useful built-in application for Emacs Lisp development.
  • Breaking through the intermediate wall in elisp / lisps in general
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 5 Dec 2022
    Edebug is your good friend :). When you are curious about a function and don't really understand it, you can step through it with the debugger, eval variables, look up docs for the functions called, C-h f and C-h v for variables. Those are available immediately in your Emacs, and just a keystroke away. I recommend installing helpful and use it at least for a while instead of standard help or in combination. I used it a lot in the beginning. It will show you the source code for a function/macro and it will also show you property list for symbols by default, so when you are learning and discovering it is really good to have those. I think I have learned more about Emacs lisp from helpful than anything else, by just seeing the code and what things do directly.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing emacs-which-key and helpful you can also consider the following projects:

hydra - make Emacs bindings that stick around

tokyonight.nvim - 🏙 A clean, dark Neovim theme written in Lua, with support for lsp, treesitter and lots of plugins. Includes additional themes for Kitty, Alacritty, iTerm and Fish.

k9s - 🐶 Kubernetes CLI To Manage Your Clusters In Style!

use-package - A use-package declaration for simplifying your .emacs

general.el - More convenient key definitions in emacs

evil-collection - A set of keybindings for evil-mode

elfeed-protocol - Provide extra protocols to make like Fever, NewsBlur, Nextcloud/ownCloud News and Tiny Tiny RSS work with elfeed

vim-which-key - :tulip: Vim plugin that shows keybindings in popup

haskell-language-server - Official haskell ide support via language server (LSP). Successor of ghcide & haskell-ide-engine.

smartparens - Minor mode for Emacs that deals with parens pairs and tries to be smart about it.

evil - The extensible vi layer for Emacs.

straight.el - 🍀 Next-generation, purely functional package manager for the Emacs hacker.