Helm

Helm

Description	incremental completion and selection narrowing framework
Author	Thierry Volpiatto
Maintainer	Thierry Volpiatto
Source	https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm

Helm is an incremental completion and selection narrowing framework for Emacs. It can be seen as a set of tools with an interactive interface that will help steer you in the right direction when you're looking for stuff in Emacs (like buffers, files, etc).

Helm is a fork of anything.el originally written by Tamas Patrovics and can be considered to be its successor. Helm sets out to clean up the legacy code in anything.el and provide a cleaner, leaner and more modular tool that's not tied in the trap of backward compatibility.

Basic setup

Most Starter_Kits like Prelude come bundled with helm.

Install with MELPA

Helm is packaged in MELPA, so: M-x package-install RET helm RET

and you're ready to try every helm command you like. You don't know where to start ? Run helm-swoop or helm-buffers-list now !

Manual install

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/helm/directory")
(require 'helm-config)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c h") 'helm-mini)

Usage

Useful Keybindings

[C-p], [C-n], <up> and <down>

Move to previous/next helm suggestion.

[M-v] [M-p]

 move to next/previous pages

[C-space]

mark candidates. This is useful when you need to perform an action on many candidates of your choice. M-a to select all.

[TAB]

access to the actions menu. An action is a command to run on marked candidates (one or more) and quit current Helm session; an action menu is a text-based menu that lists actions you can take. For example, Find File (open file), Find File in Dired, Grep File, etc.

[C-z]

executes helm-execute-persistent-action. A persistent action is an action that you use in a Helm session without quitting the session.

[C-c ?]

show help

In some Helm session, such as helm-find-files or helm-mini, you can select more than one candidates and execute actions on them, such as grep or open.

Use regular expressions

The matching mecanism uses regular expressions.

For example, in M-x helm-M-x, typing pack ^li will suggest

   list-packages

at first.

Operate on text at point

If you are already in a Helm session, you can still get input from the current editing buffer by the following key bindings:

[C-w]

yanks word at point, starting from point to the end of the word, into the Helm prompt (the minibuffer).

[M-n]

yanks symbol at point

See Also

• Ido

Project Pages

• GitHub Repo
• Wiki

Tutorial Pages

• helm-intro
• QuickSilver for Emacs: anything.el