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.
- [C-c C-i]
- insert candidates in the current buffer.
- [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-t]
- toggle the horizontal and vertical view.
- [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
Example commands
The extensive list of available commands is listed on their wiki. Some common ones are:
Many actions are available with the TAB key (open, find file in Dired, grep selected files, open as root, copy files, etc). You can also view the full list of action keys with C-c ?.
You can view images with C-u C-z on an image file, and start follow mode with C-c C-f. It uses image-dired in the background.
helm-M-x
A concurrent to the builtin M-x and smex.
Extensions
helm-ext
helm-ext has some extensions, unlikely to make it to helm, like different and even more fuzzy file path completions.
How to write elisp extensions with Helm
There is no such documentation on Helm's wiki. You'll find some on this page: how to write helm extensions.