Re: Relevance search in Emacs

[TRS-80 <lists.trs-80@isnotmyreal.name>]

> On 2020-12-05 13:18, Jean Louis wrote:
> Before weeks I was discussing and trying to find something that could
> replace the `helm' in Emacs, so that I spare using external
> libraries. Then discussion with Drew clarified that what I am looking
> is rather type of a filter. But I would like to filter by
> relevance. Some packages like `ivy' and `helm' do offer relevance
> searches. Yet I wish to spare the basic package from using external
> functions. This way me or other users can use any completion or Emacs
> built-in completion function which is generally more user friendly in
> my opinion.

In fairness I never actually used Helm, because in my initial research
it looked to me to be much more obtrusuive and less in line with
established Emacs conventions.  I chose to go with Ivy at that time and
never looked back.  Apologies to anyone who prefer Helm, I am not trying
to start some flame war.  :)

Strictly speaking, you are correct, as under the hood my understanding
is that Ivy and Helm both implement a lot of their own things "on top
of" or "in place of" the "built-in" options.  However this is not
something I have ever really noticed in terms of being any sort of
"real" problem for me in the several years I have now been using Ivy.
But rather something I only even became aware of more recently as a
theoretical / structural criticism of Ivy/Helm coming from certain
circles[0] who instead seem to prefer to implement something... I dunno,
more "minimal" or...?

If I'm being honest those criticisms struck me as a bit self-serving,
especially coming from such a relative newcomer to the field.

Also, I seem to recall hearing that there was some discussion about
moving some part (or all?) of Ivy directly into Emacs itself?  I do know
that Ivy for a long time now have been assigning their copyrights to
GNU, they are very upfront about this to contributors at their GitHub in
fact.

Even those who would criticise Ivy/Helm[0] admit that there is a lot
more functionality that they offer than the "built-in" solutions.  I
realized this in developing some of my own (as yet unreleased) packages
where I depend on some of that functionality, and thus, in fact require
Ivy as a dependency.

If this was more about search itself than choice of completion
framework, I guess I totally missed the point, or maybe that's another
discussion to have.

Anyway, maybe give Ivy a try instead of Helm.  Or if you are swayed by
arguments at my footnote link, one of those other "minimal" completion
frameworks.

Cheers,
TRS-80

[0] https://github.com/raxod502/selectrum#why-use-selectrum