helpful VS use-package

Compare helpful vs use-package and see what are their differences.

helpful

A better Emacs *help* buffer (by Wilfred)

use-package

A use-package declaration for simplifying your .emacs (by jwiegley)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
helpful use-package
34 67
1,057 4,363
- -
5.9 2.3
2 months ago about 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.
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.

use-package

Posts with mentions or reviews of use-package. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-29.
  • Use-Package & different key bindings based on host computer
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 29 Jun 2023
    Another way would be to redefine parts of the bind-key macro or its use-package support functions
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 29 Jun 2023
    I am not sure but the maybe the solution in this issue would point you to the right direction.
  • Can't remove Emacs as "cask emacs is not installed"
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 1 Jun 2023
    The package-install call installs use-package that provides a utility of the same name to make it easier to manage packages. It's admittedly a little overkill for this specific config, but it's a cheap investment that sets you up for later success.
  • symbols function definition is void: map!
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 22 May 2023
    Granted, the Doom macro makes your code looks nice and compact. But you can get very close to that just by using do-list and define-key together. Or by using the bind-key.el package, which is included with Use-package.
  • Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video
    24 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Feb 2023
    > Deps is well documented.

    > The issue I personally found is that I needed to look at a bunch of OS project's deps.edn to see how people commonly structure things. Other than that it is a simple tool.

    This strikes me as a contradiction, because if it was well documented you wouldn’t need to look at other people’s configs to see how to use it.

    My experience with deps.edn is that every time I start a project and make a deps.edn file, I immediately draw a blank and don’t know how to structure it, so I open ones from other projects to start lifting stuff out of them.

    I still don’t know how to reliably configure a project to use nrepl or socket repl without just using an editor plugin. I definitely have no idea how to use those in conjunction with a tool like reveal.

    To me, none of that is simple. Simple would be like Emacs’ use-package. With that I know how to add dependencies, specify keybinds, and do initialization and configuration off the top of my head. And it has really nice documentation with tons of examples.

    https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

  • Newbie here! Need Help!
    6 projects | /r/emacs | 29 Jan 2023
    Since you are doing code development, the first things to go for would be setting up your emacs packaging (installing use-package and melpa (use-package's documentation covers this) so you have more packages to choose from (do be careful to not just pick things willy nilly but research them a bit first)) and then setting up lsp-mode. lsp-mode lets you use LSP servers for the specific programming languages you work with in a somewhat unified fashion. You then need to install and setup the LSP servers for the languages you use, and possibly install language specific Emacs packages as support (note, Emacs has builtin functionality for many).
  • Unable to display ligatures in Emacs
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 6 Jan 2023
    I'm using use-package as my package manager and the package ligature for the ligatures.
  • Boilerplate config
    9 projects | /r/emacs | 4 Jan 2023
    I have been crafting my emacs config for about 10 years. I started with vanilla and intentionally stayed away from frameworks. About two years ago I declared config bankruptcy and went down for a rewrite using use-package and straight.
  • what is basic alghoritm/logic of installation packages to emacs?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 18 Dec 2022
    ref: https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package
  • Visual code folding?
    8 projects | /r/emacs | 27 Nov 2022
    use-package! is a macro over use-package, and respect its syntax, with a few additions. Useful reference on use-package keywords.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing helpful and use-package you can also consider the following projects:

leaf.el - Flexible, declarative, and modern init.el package configuration

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

emacs-overlay - Bleeding edge emacs overlay [maintainer=@adisbladis]

nano-emacs - GNU Emacs / N Λ N O - Emacs made simple

org-super-agenda - Supercharge your Org daily/weekly agenda by grouping items

melpa - Recipes and build machinery for the biggest Emacs package repo

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

general.el - More convenient key definitions in emacs

modus-themes - Highly accessible themes for GNU Emacs, conforming with the highest standard for colour contrast between background and foreground values (WCAG AAA).

selectrum - 🔔 Better solution for incremental narrowing in Emacs.

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