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