puni VS helpful

Compare puni vs helpful and see what are their differences.

puni

Structured editing (soft deletion, expression navigating & manipulating) that supports many major modes out of the box. (by AmaiKinono)

helpful

A better Emacs *help* buffer (by Wilfred)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
puni helpful
8 34
357 1,057
- -
6.0 5.9
3 months ago 2 months ago
Emacs Lisp Emacs Lisp
GNU General Public License v3.0 only -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

puni

Posts with mentions or reviews of puni. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-27.
  • Paredit-like features in non-lisp modes?
    4 projects | /r/emacs | 27 May 2023
  • Good Emacs Packages
    7 projects | /r/emacs | 14 May 2023
    For working with delimiters, you might want to check out Smartparens or Puni. There are many other packages like these, but those are the two I know about.
  • Tree-sitter starter guide
    7 projects | /r/emacs | 17 Jan 2023
    I'm guessing the way forward here for navigation is to change Emacs' built-in sexp-navigation when treesitter is available? forward-sexp, backward-up-list, down-list, raise-sexp etc do a good job in lisp environments, and they can now work everywhere. Packages that build on these (like Puni will automatically gain treesitter-awareness.
  • What modal sexp editing mode should I switch to?
    6 projects | /r/emacs | 10 Jan 2023
    I have never used lispy, but I have used puni for a while now, and I'm pretty satisfied with it. I am not sure that it's exactly what you're looking for since it takes a more limited approacg, but it has a lot of the same features: slurping, barfing, raising, splicing etc.
  • What packages do I need to for the best elisp editing environment?
    8 projects | /r/emacs | 6 Jan 2023
    For any Lisp you want paredit or any other structural editing package (I switched to puni recently because it’s more customizable and works with non-Lisp languages too). The first three days will suck hard because it’ll feel like the tools get in your way, but once you’re comfortable with it it’ll be the best thing ever.
  • paredit based on treesitter
    3 projects | /r/emacs | 30 Nov 2022
    Afaik puni uses only forward-sexp for navigating and manipulating sexps. So if you implement a forward-sexp-function that uses treesit.el it should work without any changes.
  • Find out a great emacs package for structural editing.
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 23 Jan 2022

helpful

Posts with mentions or reviews of helpful. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-16.
  • Is doom emacs still actively maintained?
    4 projects | /r/emacs | 16 Jun 2023
    It tweaks Emacs GC. You can run M-x describe-variable while your cursor is at gc-cons-threshold to learn about it. If you opted-in for using "Vim bindings" (Evil mode), you can press K while in normal mode. Note that K doesn't run the describe- command in Doom, but it runs helpful-command from (https://github.com/Wilfred/helpful), which provides more context that describe- commands usually do.
  • Quickly learning some LISP basics for using emacs?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 27 Apr 2023
    The packages helpful and elisp-demos are super useful because they enhance Emacs' built-in documentation.
  • Is the official GNU Emacs up to date?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 27 Apr 2023
    You can try to actually use helpful for a while. There was also a package with examples, I don't remember the name, perhaps someone else knows which I mean, that shows usage of a function where available. I remember using it and found it very useful for a while when I was learning elisp more actively. I still use helpful sometimes.
  • Best emacs configs for Javascript and/or users who don't like to memorize keybindings?
    5 projects | /r/emacs | 24 Apr 2023
    Once you got the hang of keybindings, which-key is a helpful extension (aka package) to Emacs. At this stage, there are other helpful packages and keybindings.
  • Doom -> vanilla emacs 29
    8 projects | /r/emacs | 14 Apr 2023
    helpful for better help buffers
  • Emacs terminology
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 17 Mar 2023
    Since you seem interested, have a look at elisp-demos , too. It works in tandem with helpful.
  • Good short documentation for CL functions (etc.) available?
    5 projects | /r/Common_Lisp | 16 Mar 2023
    Elisp Docs are fantastic they have documented everything while with CL most documentation is missing or only on the Web. With Emacs, one need to learn about C-h f (describe-function), C-h k (describe-key), helpful.el and elisp-demos and a new world opens. Terminology is always different, simple example: Microsoft terminology sounds like bullshit, to a Unix person.
  • At long last it is now time to ask - how do you get Emacs to open a file in the current window?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 26 Jan 2023
    To find out what a key does, you can use the describe-key command, then press, for example, C-c C-o. I would highly recommend installing the helpful package, to get the even more useful helpful-key command. Then decide how you would like to modify or rebind the command that's bound there, because keybindings are generally not bound globally. In your case, I might rebind C-c C-o to one of the ffap commands. Further, emacs generally decides how a buffer is displayed based on it's filename or major mode. You can customize this through the display-buffer-alist: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/The-Zen-of-Buffer-Display.html
  • What packages do I need to for the best elisp editing environment?
    8 projects | /r/emacs | 6 Jan 2023
    Paredit, Speed-of-thought lisp, Helm, perhaps Lispy but I am not using it myself. I found expand-region to work really well when writing and modifying elisp. lisp-extra-font-lock if you want some more blink (and font-lock-studio). Helpful is very good to have instead of built-in help, it displays the source code by default as well as symbol properties. It is a very informative learning experience to see how built-in stuff is implemented. I am quite lazy to press extra in built-in help to see the source code, but with Helpful, you get it auto in the same window, whicih is great for learning. Seeing symbol properties is sometimes a time saver so you don't have to M-: and type an Elisp function to see the symbol properties when debugging. Learn Edebug, it is very useful built-in application for Emacs Lisp development.
  • Breaking through the intermediate wall in elisp / lisps in general
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 5 Dec 2022
    Edebug is your good friend :). When you are curious about a function and don't really understand it, you can step through it with the debugger, eval variables, look up docs for the functions called, C-h f and C-h v for variables. Those are available immediately in your Emacs, and just a keystroke away. I recommend installing helpful and use it at least for a while instead of standard help or in combination. I used it a lot in the beginning. It will show you the source code for a function/macro and it will also show you property list for symbols by default, so when you are learning and discovering it is really good to have those. I think I have learned more about Emacs lisp from helpful than anything else, by just seeing the code and what things do directly.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing puni and helpful you can also consider the following projects:

emacs-which-key - Emacs package that displays available keybindings in popup

elisp-demos - Demonstrate Emacs Lisp APIs

smartparens - Minor mode for Emacs that deals with parens pairs and tries to be smart about it.

jinx - 🪄 Enchanted Spell Checker

marginalia - :scroll: marginalia.el - Marginalia in the minibuffer

GNU Emacs - Mirror of GNU Emacs

symex.el - An intuitive way to edit Lisp symbolic expressions ("symexes") structurally in Emacs

solarized-emacs - The Solarized colour theme, ported to Emacs.

use-package - A use-package declaration for simplifying your .emacs

remacs - Rust :heart: Emacs

current-window-only - Open things only in the current window. No other windows, no splits.

json-ordered-tidy - A fancy JSON tidier that can arbitrarily order object keys