ivy-rich VS gnus-recent

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

I use bbdb for contacts ((bbdb-initialize 'gnus 'message), and https://github.com/unhammer/gnavatar for faces). I use https://github.com/unhammer/gnus-recent/ since I often want to go back to (or org-link to) some message I recently looked at.

Sent's are also tracked by https://github.com/unhammer/gnus-recent/ now :)