embark VS swiper

It’s very hard to describe without a visual but the gist of it is that the combination of the following 3 packages make it possible dynamically create queries, refine the results to precisely what you want, and then either perform some action on them or just plop them into a buffer for later use. There’s some notion of a type of the result, which means that the actions and results can be richer than just plaintext. Ie: you can imagine a query over a list of commits, where it displays while you’re searching as only the commit shortrev and subject, but where you can viably define a filter on the commit date or commit author. You can then export that list to a temporary buffer, and pressing enter on any given commit will show you the full diff and the full commit message.

https://github.com/minad/consult/

https://github.com/oantolin/orderless/

https://github.com/oantolin/embark/

embark. The one I always struggle to explain, so instead go read u/karthink's wonderful blog post about it! Prodded by u/minad-emacs, I just released version 1.0! 🎉

using embark, you need to set a keybind to embark, then use the ripgrep normally, when the minibuffer returns the results, call the embark via keybind and use embark-export, that is bind to E, then embark will create a buffer with the results from minibuffer

There seems to be some problem with straight not correctly installing or updating compat. See these issues on Marginalia and Embark where straight seems to not install Compat.

It also comes with “batteries included,” containing several integrations with noteworthy packages, in particularEmbark, that you can take advantage of for nimbly interacting with your configs and clusters.

I have a cheap way to do this involving Embark and Consult: use consult-imenu as an embark action on an identifier. (You need consult-imenu here because it flattens the imenu hierarchy). Say you bind embark-act to C-., then you can put point on an identifier and type C-. C i and embark will run consult-imenu for you, type the identifier at the minibuffer prompt automatically, and if there is a single matching item, press RET for you too. (If more than one item matches, then you must select among them and press RET.)

I use embark and one of the options it gives on find-file is to open it via sudo (C-. s for me, and I think that's default bindings). So I would browse to the host at /ssh::/etc/foo/bar.conf and rather than just opening it hit C-. s.

I dunno—I like how Vertico+Counsel feel. I'm not sure how good the support for Orderless and Embark are in Ivy, but I really like how those packages compose so nicely with the Vertico+Consult ecosystem.

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.