helpful VS marginalia

Compare helpful vs marginalia and see what are their differences.

helpful

A better Emacs *help* buffer (by Wilfred)

marginalia

:scroll: marginalia.el - Marginalia in the minibuffer (by minad)
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helpful marginalia
34 27
1,057 687
- -
5.9 7.3
2 months ago 12 days 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.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
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.

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.

marginalia

Posts with mentions or reviews of marginalia. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-04.
  • Emacs Commands I Got by with for Years
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2024
    Check out marginalia[1]. Whenever you press M-x, it will pop up a buffer showing all the commands (with most recent ones on top) along with their keybindings and a brief description of what they do.

    Embark[2] is also cool. It will show all the possible commands relevant to where the cursor is at that moment. I bind it to C-c a.

    [1] https://github.com/minad/marginalia

  • Packages that you would like to be in emacs core ?
    10 projects | /r/emacs | 11 Dec 2023
    Then there is Marginalia which is IMO essential
  • Emacs Advent Calendar 7: ordeless, embark 1.0 and some bric-a-brac
    9 projects | /r/emacs | 7 Dec 2023
    marginalia. Informative annotations for minibuffer completion candidates, co-written with u/minad-emacs.
  • Why does elpaca make emacs startup so much faster?
    9 projects | /r/emacs | 23 Apr 2023
    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.
  • Doom -> vanilla emacs 29
    8 projects | /r/emacs | 14 Apr 2023
    marginalia for extra info in the minibuffer
  • (void-variable string-width) error by consult-buffer
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 10 Apr 2023
    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.
  • What does Vertico offer over icomplete-vertical?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 24 Feb 2023
    Note that I contribute to Emacs core itself from time to time but the process is discussion-heavy and thus time consuming. If you are familiar with the completing-read API, you may know the annotation-function of completion tables. The name already tells that this function just adds annotations to the completion candidates. The Marginalia package (written by /u/oantolin and me) provides such annotations. A similar function is the group-function, which groups candidates in subsets and adds titles above the subsets. I wrote the patch which added this feature to Emacs. It is now supported by default completion, Icomplete, Vertico and maybe other UIs. The initial implementation was done in the earlier Selectrum package, and a little later in Vertico.
  • [ANN] Vertico 1.0 and Marginalia 1.0
    3 projects | /r/emacs | 22 Dec 2022
    At the end of the year, I am happy to announce the stable Vertico 1.0 and Marginalia 1.0 releases. Vertico is a minimalist, yet flexible and responsive vertical completion UI. Marginalia provides helpful annotations for many completion contexts. Both packages have been solid for a while but I rather let things mature slowly. These releases finally put the stamp "stable" on these two packages. I expect the other members of the package suite to follow soon after. Both packages have been updated recently to support the newest Emacs 29 features. They are compatible with Emacs 27, 28 and the upcoming 29.
  • org-cc: Custom completions for Org (WIP)
    9 projects | /r/emacs | 22 Nov 2022
    I) I started out trying to implement this using marginalia, like the consult commands, but quickly concluded that this wasn't the way to go here... please correct me if I'm wrong and there is more from these packages I could make use of. I also try to make use of as much of the citar codebase as possible, but have found it difficult so far: a lot seems too specific for bibliographic entries.
  • Idea/Question: Using "feature-full" packages (e.g. dired) for completion?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 8 Sep 2022
    I can't find anything that seems to discuss them in detail, but Marginalia is a package that applies them widely in completion. And here is a simple example for customized file completion.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing helpful and marginalia you can also consider the following projects:

embark - Emacs Mini-Buffer Actions Rooted in Keymaps

emacs-which-key - Emacs package that displays available keybindings in popup

corfu - :desert_island: corfu.el - COmpletion in Region FUnction

eglot - A client for Language Server Protocol servers

org-remark - Highlight & annotate text, EWW, Info, and EPUB

vertico - :dizzy: vertico.el - VERTical Interactive COmpletion

emacs-libvterm - Emacs libvterm integration

icomplete-vertical - Global Emacs minor mode to display icomplete candidates vertically

selectrum - 🔔 Better solution for incremental narrowing in Emacs.

exwm - Emacs X Window Manager

orderless - Emacs completion style that matches multiple regexps in any order

consult-flycheck - Consult integration for Flycheck