marginalia VS swiper

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

Then there is Marginalia which is IMO essential

marginalia. Informative annotations for minibuffer completion candidates, co-written with u/minad-emacs.

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.

marginalia for extra info in the 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.