marginalia VS selectrum

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.

Selectrum's wiki has some basic info on completing-read: https://github.com/radian-software/selectrum/wiki/Tips-for-Creating-Commands

[1] https://github.com/radian-software/selectrum/issues/114

I noticed over the weekend that the venerable Selectrum package made by Radon Rosborough has been deprecated in favor of Daniel Mendler's Vertico package.

https://github.com/radian-software/selectrum is getting superceded by https://github.com/minad/vertico within just a year or two.

I have been using straight for a while now and I think it is great! The ability to lazy load everything by default does a lot to make Emacs snappier (or at the very least, faster to boot). Being able to pull packages directly from git (be it local or a forge) makes package development a lot easier. raxod has a lot of really sleek, modern emacs packages that I would encourage everyone to check out, spectrum[0] and ctrf[1] in particular are really great as well.

[0] https://github.com/radian-software/selectrum

selectrum

;;https://github.com/raxod502/selectrum (defun force-debug (func &rest args) (condition-case e (apply func args) ((debug error) (signal (car e) (cdr e))))) (advice-add #'selectrum--minibuffer-post-command-hook :around #'force-debug) (selectrum-mode +1) ;; to make sorting and filtering more intelligent (selectrum-prescient-mode +1) ;; to save your command history on disk, so the sorting gets more ;; intelligent over time (prescient-persist-mode +1) (setq completion-styles '(orderless)) ;; Persist history over Emacs restarts (savehist-mode) ;; Optional performance optimization ;; by highlighting only the visible candidates. (setq orderless-skip-highlighting (lambda () selectrum-is-active)) (setq selectrum-highlight-candidates-function #'orderless-highlight-matches) (setq selectrum-prescient-enable-filtering nil) (selectrum-prescient-mode +1) (prescient-persist-mode +1) (use-package marginalia :ensure t :config (marginalia-mode)) (use-package embark :ensure t :bind (("C-." . embark-act) ;; pick some comfortable binding ("C-;" . embark-dwim) ;; good alternative: M-. ("C-h B" . embark-bindings)) ;; alternative for \describe-bindings' :init ;; Optionally replace the key help with a completing-read interface (setq prefix-help-command #'embark-prefix-help-command) :config ;; Hide the mode line of the Embark live/completions buffers (add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist '("\`\Embark Collect \(Live\|Completions\)\" nil (window-parameters (mode-line-format . none))))) ;; Consult users will also want the embark-consult package. (use-package embark-consult :ensure t :after (embark consult) :demand t ; only necessary if you have the hook below ;; if you want to have consult previews as you move around an ;; auto-updating embark collect buffer :hook (embark-collect-mode . consult-preview-at-point-mode))`

Selectrum and Prescient would be nice.