embark VS emacs-config

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.

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?

block-undo. Have keyboard macros undo in a single step (something vi gets right!).

Installing that Embark key series implementation I mentioned above, to get extra actions for key series such binding them to a key or turning them into named keyboard macros.

Generally I recommend to maintain all personal code in the form of tiny but proper Elisp libraries. The config just glues everything together using use-package/setup/your-self-baked-macro. See also /u/oantolin's config which uses this style: https://github.com/oantolin/emacs-config. I cannot recommend this enough!

I have 3720 lines in my configuration. I try to write as much of it as tiny packages that I configure with use-package, just like I do for external packages. (I highly recommend this form of organization) Many of these are only useful to me, but some would be very reasonable to steal, like:

I have a slightly different take on this in my configuration, file shr-heading.el. In addition to imenu support I wanted next and previous heading navigation commands. It turns out you then get imenu support for free, since one way you can specify imenu entries is by providing a "goto previous imenu entry" function.

I wrote a small drag-region package once. You mark a region, turn on drag-region-mode and then your normal motion commands will drag the region along until you turn the minor mode off again. I never tested it with evil.

I'm very happy with ecomplete now, I mostly just need the completion and automatic storing of addresses I write to, as configured in your post. But occasionally I want to remove an address or manually add one, so I wrote a couple of commands to do that which I bind in embark-email-map to + (for adding) and \ (for removing). I don't think I've used these commands directly, always as Embark actions. When I want to add an email to ecomplete I usually have it written in some buffer already. And the command to remove an email I've only ever used from the ecomplete completion interface or from a message buffer after mistakenly having inserted it and realized that's an old address I'll never use again.

I keep some packages in a subdirectory my personal configuration and don't create a separate repo for them. (Also, not every file there is really a package that could be released: some don't follow proper naming conventions, or depend on details of my configuration).