ivy-rich VS swiper

The screenshot might picture marginalia as another user already mentioned. What package you want to use depends on the completion framework you are using. For built in completion framework together with vertico, icomplete or selectrum marginalia is the package you want. If you are using ivy instead, then ivy-rich provides this functionality. Surely helm has some similar functionality.

Check out the package itself and some screenshots

Some examples of what I am talking about: https://github.com/Yevgnen/ivy-rich/blob/master/screenshots.org

From looking at these examples, no. This is what the shortdocs look like: https://imgur.com/5pIu9A6.png. A brief summary, grouped by kinds of operations with examples. Built into Emacs, linked to from the *Help* buffer no external documentation is required.

Having been a longtime user of ido and smex, I decided to give ivy/counsel a try. Overall, I like it very much. I like that the key-bindings are more consistent with Emacs conventions, and I like how it can be extended with packages like ivy-rich and all-the-icons-ivy-rich to add useful auxiliary information and give it a more modern looking interface. But there are still a few things that I can't wrap my head around, and for which I couldn't find a satisfactory answer online:

fyi, opened an issue on this: https://github.com/Yevgnen/ivy-rich/issues/102

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.

Great question. I have one big file with a few hundreds book and quotations from them. Problem is with newlines. When I copy text from kindle it doesn't have newlines because it's depends on font size. So every quotation from book is on one line - could be few thousands chars. I use visual-line-mode and there is a big problem with that. Like swiper would just freeze your emacs if you try to search. https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper/issues/925 Anyone have same problem?

Then hit C-' (that's apostrophe, left of enter on US keyboards). Preferably with something like [ivy][https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper] set up so you can see what it's trying to autocomplete for you- it should be suggesting all of your org 'notebooks' in the targeted folder, as well as any buffers you have open.