marginalia VS vertico

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.

It would be great if you add your snippet to the Vertico wiki. Such tweaks can be quite instructive for others who want to achieve the same or similar effects for other completion commands.

If you want completion to be sorted by your "most recent" I suggest you have a look at completion libraries. One example is vertico; when you enable savehist mode, the variable magit-revision-history, containing the branches you visited is persisted between sessions and vertico use that offer completions by most-recently-used, by default.

I think vertico is best alternative recently, really fast on Linux, macOS and Windows.

(use-package modus-themes :vc (:url "https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes" :branch "main")) (use-package vertico :vc (:url "https://github.com/minad/vertico" :rev :newest :lisp-dir "extensions/"))

An example relevant to your list would be some changes many people are taking with their completion framework - using package that leverage core emacs functionality rather than replacing it with a complete package that 'overrides' it. Consult, vertico, orderless and associate packages come to mind here. If you do a bit of a search you'll find plenty of info. Here is a video from Prot on the subject, but there are many others as well. I think Prot actually went on to write his own completion system to overlay native emacs functionality as well.

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).

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.

I thought that lsp and rtags were different tools to do different things. Regarding lsp, I configured lsp-mode in my init file indeed! Currently I'm using Vertico (plus recommended sub-packages at github repository) and lsp-mode.

Hey! There has already been a horizontico.el. ;)

FYI, selectrum is getting deprecated in favor of vertico. https://github.com/minad/vertico/issues/237