embark VS consult

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! 🎉

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.

Surfingkeys looks pretty similar (though I have yet to try it); I'm just describing the experience poorly. You press f, little labels show up on the links (I called this "listing the links"), and you then press the keys on the label (the "select from" part). Probably me using the open in new tab command F (as opposed to open in current tab command f) did not help.

Not saying it's a bad experience. I find it's quite nice if I'm currently looking at the correct link so I can get the letters from the label easily.

It's just a different paradigm. If I didn't know what a link was, I wouldn't know that I could press f to open the link selection. This means I can't select a link unless I had a "select unknown" button, and then use that to inspect it.

Select unknown can be done with the keyboard: Emacs' embark[^1] is a good example of it. You use search/arrows to go to an interesting piece of text (e.g something underlined), run embark, and it lists all the potential things you can do with it (e.g open in external browser, or download an archived copy). It's just that keyboard UIs do not tend to be geared around it.

That though is the sort of thing the mouse is good at: you see something interesting, you prod it to see what you can do with it.

Say you saw a phrase you didn't understand in the browser. Currently, with a mouse you'd highlight it, right click, and then select the search with search engine option. With keyboard you'd open the search engine, and enter the phrase. Both get you to the same place.

Now if we extend the mouse to have a "I would like to know idioms better" option. You could just select the phrase, right click, and a definition could be there waiting for you next to the context menu. It could even be there on hover.

With the keyboard though, you'd generally run an "I would like to know idioms better" command. This would then ask you which idiom on the page would you like to understand. You then select it, and presto. A faster version could potentially have idiom meanings show up the moment you ran the command by a similar hover effect (or just listing all discovered idioms in a popup etc).

One of the differences here though is that from the mouse you still have a list of actions on the text open, so maybe if you liked the definition you could then copy the phrase.

This certainly could be done from the keyboard UI: just have it list other applicable commands that could be run on the selection generated from the command that searched for phrases. No reason why it could not then spawn something asking if you wanted to "(c)opy, c(u)t" etc like the context menu.

But that is only visible because there was a phrase you didn't know. If you didn't know that there was a command to define phrases, you wouldn't have found out. In theory you could have commands register everything they could act on, and then have another command let the user select an interactive thing, and list the commands that registered for it. I think that would be overwhelming though, as something like a dictionary command would register for every word.

Ultimately the mouse is just different then the keyboard, and I think that discarding it because you majorily use a keyboard is missing the interesting potential of having a tool that can interrogate arbitrary things on your screen.

[1]: https://github.com/oantolin/embark

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.

IV) Might there be a way to implement changing the sort order while the completing-read prompt is active? Or might it be a good idea to abandon completing-read completely for this and other features, like live editing? I am aware that some of this can be accomplished with Embark. Org tables and some other Emacs table libraries also go some way in this direction. The dream would be to have citar-like dynamic table construction + filtering + selection and Excel-like sorting + editing. Is anyone aware of any other package that goes into this direction?

Yes, Helm. Probably others like Embark.

BTW, as an alternative to swiper, you can check out consult-line and related commands from consult.

Emacs has code peek.

With lsp-mode it has that little window: https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-ui/#lsp-ui-peek

Personally I use eglot with consult which temporarily switches the entire buffer to do the "peek" functionality rather than popping up a tiny window: https://github.com/minad/consult

P.S. I saw another approach to doing that: https://github.com/minad/consult/pull/774. But minad decided not to merge it due to perf and personal preference. Mine is a little better performance-wise: it checks for highlighting only visible candidates and caches the highlight overlays (of which there can be many). But I am not sure if I will be able to overcome minad's personal preference, so don't want to bother with PR. If someone wants to polish this code and try merge into mainline, I won't mind. Think of this code as "public domain".

Thanks for working on this! I just added a consult--maybe-recenter function in a recent commit. This is a nice idea since it can reduce the jumpiness of Consult preview quite a bit.

An example relevant to your list would be some changes many people are taking with their completion framework - using package that leverage core emacs functionality rather than replacing it with a complete package that 'overrides' it. Consult, vertico, orderless and associate packages come to mind here. If you do a bit of a search you'll find plenty of info. Here is a video from Prot on the subject, but there are many others as well. I think Prot actually went on to write his own completion system to overlay native emacs functionality as well.

For the "lauch workspaces", I use burly which just uses simple bookmarks. Then with consult, I just use C-x b, then m to narrow to bookmarks and I have all the workspaces available (remote as well).

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "Invalid face" bookmark-menu-heading) internal-set-lisp-face-attribute(bookmark-menu-heading :family unspecified 0) set-face-attribute(bookmark-menu-heading nil :foreground unspecified :background unspecified :family unspecified :slant unspecified :weight unspecified :height unspecified :underline unspecified :overline unspecified :box unspecified :inherit nano-face-strong) set-face(bookmark-menu-heading nano-face-strong) #() eval-after-load-helper("/usr/local/share/emacs/29.0.90/lisp/bookmark.elc") run-hook-with-args(eval-after-load-helper "/usr/local/share/emacs/29.0.90/lisp/bookmark.elc") do-after-load-evaluation("/usr/local/share/emacs/29.0.90/lisp/bookmark.elc") require(bookmark) byte-code("\300\301!\210\300\302!\210\303\304\305\306\307\310\307\311\307\312\313\314\313\315\313\316\317\320&\21\210\321\322\323\324\325DD\326\327\330%\210\321\331\323\324\332DD\333\327..." [require compat bookmark custom-declare-group consult nil "Consulting `completing-read'." :link (info-link :tag "Info Manual" "(consult)") (url-link :tag "Homepage" "https://github.com/minad/consult") (emacs-library-link :tag "Library Source" "consult.el") :group files outlines minibuffer :prefix "consult-" custom-declare-variable consult-narrow-key funcall function #f(compiled-function () #) "Prefix key for narrowing during completion.\n\nGood ..." :type (choice key (const nil)) consult-widen-key #f(compiled-function () #) "Key used for widening during completion.\n\nIf this ..." (choice key (const nil)) consult-project-function #f(compiled-function () #) "Function which returns project root directory.\nThe..." (choice function (const nil)) consult-async-refresh-delay #f(compiled-function () #) "Refreshing delay of the completion UI for asynchro..." float consult-async-input-throttle #f(compiled-function () #) "Input throttle for asynchronous commands.\n\nThe asy..." consult-async-input-debounce #f(compiled-function () #) "Input debounce for asynchronous commands.\n\nThe asy..." consult-async-min-input #f(compiled-function () #) "Minimum number of letters needed, before asynchron..." natnum consult-async-split-style #f(compiled-function () #) "Async splitting style, see `consult-async-split-st..." ...] 18) require(consult) byte-code("\300\301!\210\302\303\304\305#\210\306\211\203,\0\211@\303\1N\203%\0\304\1N\204%\0\307\304\2\303\4N#\210\1A\266\202\202\13\0\210\310\303\304\311#..." [require consult defvaralias consult-notes-sources consult-notes-file-dir-sources nil (saved-value saved-variable-comment) put make-obsolete-variable "0.6" consult-notes--all-sources consult-notes-all-sources custom-declare-group consult-notes "Search notes with consult." :group convenience custom-declare-variable consult-notes-category funcall function #f(compiled-function () #) "Category symbol for the notes in this package." :type symbol #f(compiled-function () #) "Sources for `consult-notes'." (repeat symbol) #f(compiled-function () #) "Directories of files for searching with `consult-n..." (list string key string) consult-notes-file-dir-annotate-function #f(compiled-function () #) "Function to call for annotations of file note dire..." consult-notes-use-rg #f(compiled-function () #) "Whether to use ripgrep or just grep for text searc..." boolean consult-notes-ripgrep-args #f(compiled-function () #) "Arguments for `ripgrep' and `consult-notes-search-..." string consult-notes-grep-args #f(compiled-function () #) "Arguments for `grep' and `consult-notes-search-in-..." consult-notes-default-format #f(compiled-function () #) "Default format for `consult-notes' open function." sexp consult-notes-max-relative-age ...] 8) (consult-notes-org-headings-mode) eval-buffer() ; Reading at buffer position 2730 funcall-interactively(eval-buffer) call-interactively(eval-buffer record nil) command-execute(eval-buffer record) execute-extended-command(nil "eval-buffer" "eval-bu") funcall-interactively(execute-extended-command nil "eval-buffer" "eval-bu") call-interactively(execute-extended-command nil nil) command-execute(execute-extended-command)

Wow, interesting that my response is getting down voted. It seems not enough that I give away my work for free. Nevertheless I appreciate support from the community, as other Emacs package developers. The support is actually helpful. To clarify, publishing my configuration would translate into quite a bit of work, requiring separation of private and public bits.

They're still coming in. This one is from yesterday: https://github.com/minad/consult/issues/793