Demo video demonstrating some highlights

[clemera]

@revrari mentioned he might want to record another video demonstrating more highlights of Selectrum in usage with Consult, Marginalia, Orderless and Embark (CC @minad and @oantolin). This issue is for discussing ideas and features which are worth including in such a demonstration to make it interesting and give a broad enough overview of the current capabilities.

Here are some features of Selectrum that might be worth showing/mentioning in such a demo:

• General emphasis of keeping the usual minibuffer commands/features working unless we provide an enhanced replacement
• File prompts with partial input /some/long/path/ -> /so/lo/pa/
• Selection of candidates using quick keys (using M-i/M-m)
• Toggling between vertical/horizontal display style (using M-q)
• Using selectrum-display-action to display candidates outside the minibuffer
• Selecting multiple candidates via completing-read-multiple
• History browsing (using M-r) (C-i/TAB to insert and proceed, RET/C-m to select and submit)

[minad]

From the perspective of Consult it makes sense to show case the most important search/navigation commands:

• consult-buffer (already discussed shortly in the current video by @revrari)
• consult-line
• consult-outline
• consult-imenu (narrowing)
• consult-grep/ripgrep (how does the filtering work, passing options via #xyz -- -i#xyz for example)

Then I've often seen the need to browse the kill ring using consult-yank-pop. But note that Emacs 28 also has this built-in in a simpler form.

There are many more like "hidden gems", I particularly like the consult-register-load/store commands which I find pretty handy. I think in the end one should point the users to the readmes/wikis and encourage them to explore a bit.

In combination with Embark it may be really good to show the workflows:

• consult-line -> embark-export -> occur-edit-mode
• consult-ripgrep -> embark-export -> wgrep

The nice thing here is that Embark simply reuses the normal occur and grep mode. This is generally great about Embark, that actions/commands are simply reused. This is not to be overstated!

[oantolin]

One Embark feature which is perhaps not used as much as it could be is acting on things in non-minibuffer buffers. Say you bind embark-act to C-,. Then C-, w is my favorite way of getting the symbol at point into the kill-ring, or the full path of the file name at point (which includes things like the path to foo.el in (use-package foo ...)).

I also like using C-, M-% to replace the symbol at point (for this, make sure to put point at the beginning of the symbol, otherwise, query-replace misses that particular occurrence of the symbol).

In combination with consult-line, you can get a quick overview of all the occurrences of the symbol at point with C-, C l. (Of course you can also call consult-line and press M-n twice, but I find embark-act more convenient.) Or if you want to search for the symbol at point in all files in the current directory, say, you can use C-, C g to run consult-grep.

Another consult-line trick I use fairly often is that if I want to insert at point a duplicate of a line that is in the same buffer but far away from the point, I'll call consult-line to find the line using completion and then use C-, i to insert it at point. (Note that this example does use embark-act in the minibuffer, unlike all the others ---I include it because writing about consult-line reminded me.)

I sometimes mention Emacs commands in emails or markdown buffers (I'm typing this comment in a Markdown buffer). To make sure I don't spout nonsense I usually call describe-function to read the docstring of the function while I'm writing the text. And then I don't need to retype the function name in the email or markdown buffer: I switch to the help buffer, which leaves point on the function name, and press C-, i which inserts it in the text.

The other day I found myself needing to paste a bunch of book titles into several online bookstore websites, and I had the book titles in an org table. I quickly added an Embark target finder for the contents of the current org table cell to my init.el and then just used C-, w to put the cell contents in the OS clipboard. (I should probably add that target finder to Embark itself at some point.)

[oantolin]

(I guess the consult-grep tip isn't so hot, because you can run consult-grep and press M-n once; it's more savings for consult-line which needs two M-ns.)

[clemera]

I also use embark to open video links with mpv, I got the idea from here, transforming region contents is also nice with it.

[clemera]

Another thing that wasn't mentioned yet is the component wise matching of orderless using dispatchers.

[clemera]

@revrari Don't feel pressured to demo everything we mention here, just pick what you personally find interesting enough or which you think fit into a coherent demo. Always feel free to ask for more info how to do something if you run into problems, also see here for basic setups of various combinations. You can run the test scripts using:

cd test; ./run.sh <package-combo>.el

If you are using which-key you might also like to use it for getting prompted for embark actions:

(setq embark-action-indicator
      (lambda (map &optional _target)
        (which-key--show-keymap "Embark" map nil nil 'no-paging)
        #'which-key--hide-popup-ignore-command)
      embark-become-indicator embark-action-indicator)

Regarding orderless here is a my setup:

(setq orderless-matching-styles
      '(orderless-strict-leading-initialism orderless-regexp))

(setq orderless-style-dispatchers
      (list (defun my-orderless-dispatch (pattern _index total)
              (cond
               ((string-prefix-p "!" pattern)
                `(orderless-without-literal . ,(substring pattern 1)))
               ((string-suffix-p "!" pattern)
                `(orderless-strict-full-initialism . ,(substring pattern 0 -1)))
               ((string-suffix-p "=" pattern) `(orderless-literal . ,(substring pattern 0 -1)))
               ((string-suffix-p "~" pattern) `(orderless-flex . ,(substring pattern 0 -1)))))))

For example type !-- to exclude private elisp functions from you search or uf! to get only matches with exactly u and f as initials.

[hmelman]

Agreed on all of the above. Also:

• consult-line -> embark-collect-snapshot -> editing the buffer - I do this a lot with markdown lists to pull out all the checked or unchecked items and then edit them for something else. It's also great to pull out a set of function or variable definitions in a source file and include them in a message.
• consult-focus-lines
• some find-file-like command -> embark-act -> x for consult-file-externally

Thank you all for your input. I am going to carefully study your remarks and will revert back if necessary.

@revrari mentioned he might want to record another video demonstrating more highlights of Selectrum in usage with Consult, Marginalia, Orderless and Embark (CC @minad and @oantolin). This issue is for discussing ideas and features which are worth including in such a demonstration to make it interesting and give a broad enough overview of the current capabilities.

Here are some features of Selectrum that might be worth showing/mentioning in such a demo:

• General emphasis of keeping the usual minibuffer commands/features working unless we provide an enhanced replacement
• File prompts with partial input /some/long/path/ -> /so/lo/pa/
• Selection of candidates using quick keys (using M-i/M-m)
• Toggling between vertical/horizontal display style (using M-q)
• Using selectrum-display-action to display candidates outside the minibuffer
• Selecting multiple candidates via completing-read-multiple
• History browsing (using M-r) (C-i/TAB to insert and proceed, RET/C-m to select and submit)

Thank you. I have looked at each of these and have tested each. They are great features. I would recommend that we create several videos highlighting the features of each program rather than create one long video which looks at the features of all the programs. I.e. do a video called "Selectrum Tweaks" and then "Consult Tweaks" etc.

I would personally not include a feature like 'Selecting multiple candidates via completing-read-multiple' as this is a niche feature that may not be of interest to general users. I am however open to a different point of view.

[minad]

I would personally not include a feature like 'Selecting multiple candidates via completing-read-multiple' as this is a niche feature that may not be of interest to general users. I am however open to a different point of view.

I agree. There are many features we may like as developers since we spent a lot of time thinking about it, but which are not as important enough to be highlighted. Maybe take our ideas here just as hints to which features exist and pick what you like the best, fitting your workflow.

From the perspective of Consult it makes sense to show case the most important search/navigation commands:

• consult-buffer (already discussed shortly in the current video by @revrari)
• consult-line
• consult-outline
• consult-imenu (narrowing)
• consult-grep/ripgrep (how does the filtering work, passing options via #xyz -- -i#xyz for example)

Then I've often seen the need to browse the kill ring using consult-yank-pop. But note that Emacs 28 also has this built-in in a simpler form.

There are many more like "hidden gems", I particularly like the consult-register-load/store commands which I find pretty handy. I think in the end one should point the users to the readmes/wikis and encourage them to explore a bit.

In combination with Embark it may be really good to show the workflows:

• consult-line -> embark-export -> occur-edit-mode
• consult-ripgrep -> embark-export -> wgrep

The nice thing here is that Embark simply reuses the normal occur and grep mode. This is generally great about Embark, that actions/commands are simply reused. This is not to be overstated!

Thank you for this. I have studied it carefully and think I can highlight all these features in one video. I understand these commands. I have a few questions:

Please explain what you mean by "recursive editing" (i.e. vis-à-vis consult-outline and consult-line) and briefly how this can be done.

You say that consult-buffer supports virtual buffers. Please be more specific as to how this can be enabled (say) for files that have been closed.

One more question. Is there a simply way (a shortcut key perhaps) to copy commands invoked with M-x from the minibuffer into another buffer? Would one need embark for this?

• consult-grep/ripgrep (how does the filtering work, passing options via #xyz -- -i#xyz for example)

Please explain more fully his syntax to me.

• consult-line
• consult-outline

What would you like me to add specifically about these commands which I did not cover in my 1st video.

[minad]

Please explain what you mean by "recursive editing" (i.e. vis-à-vis consult-outline and consult-line) and briefly how this can be done.

You can set enable-recursive-minibuffers to t, then you can jump out of the minibuffer with C-x o and edit the existing buffers. (When you start a minibuffer you enter a recursive editing session - this recursion really happens on the C stack since you start a new recursive event loop.)

Now what I mean with "supports recursive editing" - the commands are robust if line numbers or buffers change. For example if you run consult-line, jump out of the minibuffer, edit, move lines around, then jump back to the minibuffer, the search results will still jump to the correct location.

You say that consult-buffer supports virtual buffers. Please be more specific as to how this can be enabled (say) for files that have been closed.

It is enabled by default if you have recentf-mode enabled. You can configure more virtual buffer sources or write your own even, see https://github.com/minad/consult#multiple-sources.

One more question. Is there a simply way (a shortcut key perhaps) to copy commands invoked with M-x from the minibuffer into another buffer? Would one need embark for this?

You can copy the currently selected candidate with embark-save to the kill ring.

Please explain more fully his syntax to me.

See https://github.com/minad/consult#asynchronous-search.

What would you like me to add specifically about these commands which I did not cover in my 1st video.

I think I saw on reddit that people wanted to see a longer showcase of swiper/consult-line. So maybe make it a bit more detailed? Interesting use cases:

• consult-line -> embark-snapshot
• consult-line -> embark-export -> occur-edit-mode