[kozikow]

Let's start a thread with "little cheries" you found in emacs! Focus on things that you found after years of usage and you regret not noticing before.

Given Emacs scope age it's sometimes easy to miss some very cool stuff. What's more, lots of things on Internet are outdated.

I will start:

  - elscreen - you can configure it to get tmux-lookalike inside emacs. My config: https://gist.github.com/kozikow/58b46c45a2c24406dc7cde3f18610433
  - hydra - create mini-menus in the mini buffer. Quick and reduces amount of shortcuts you need to remember. See previous point for example.
  - apropos/helm-apropos - search across all variables/functions/commands at once.
  - imenu/helm-semantic-or-imenu : get overview of all definitions in current file, including classes or functions. Works in majority of languages without special setup.

[sooheon]

Magit gets a lot of deserved love on the internet, but I think abo-abo (the author of hydra, which you listed) is quietly leading a kind of revolution in emacs usage. His trifecta of packages lispy (edit at the speed of thought in lisps), swiper/ivy (a simple and powerful interface to every facet of your editor), and hydra are the main reasons I use emacs over vim.

[pzone]

I am a long time Helm user. I tried Swiper/Ivy when they were first announced and appreciated the speed and simplicity, but found the features somewhat lacking compared to Helm. There has been a bit of buzz about these abo-abo's ecosystem recently and I discovered a configuration option in Spacemacs to replace Helm with Ivy, so I think I plan to give it another shot.

[sooheon]

Yeah the spacemacs-ivy implementation is a good place to start. One decision they've made I disagree with is the abomination of a hydra they've put in (what you get when you press C-o in a ivy minibuffer prompt). If you're interested in a more streamlined one, take a look here: https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra/wiki/hydra-ivy-replacement

[kozikow]

lispy - I use smartparens, it have mostly similar feature set. Smartparens advantage over paredit (and it seems lispy) is that it focuses on giving good support for editing parantheses groups in any language. E.g. you can use it to edit C++ expressions. See my post: https://kozikow.com/2016/06/18/smartparens-emacs-package-is-...

swiper/ivy - I am already hardly locked in into helm. Even if some competing packages are more powerful (e.g. I used icicles at some point) or faster (e.g. ivy) due to big community helm have lots of community-contributed, helm-optimised packages. Type M-x install-package helm- vs ivy-.

[sooheon]

lispy/smartparens: FWIW, I use both. If you think they have a similar feature set, you haven't looked at lispy closely enough. It is more about making lisp editing operations frictionless, than it is just pair management.

Check out the simple overview[1], and maybe some demos[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BverGxP41cE [2] https://github.com/abo-abo/lispy#demos

swiper/helm: this is more of a personal choice, I agree. Having given both a fair shake, I find ivy more easily extensible, and I prefer the simpler look. As for the community support, there has yet to be something for only helm that I've missed in the various counsel functions.

[fovc]

For me God Mode [1] has been amazing. It's modal editing (like evil or vim), but using emacs key bindings. Your make memory adapts to not hitting C- very quickly, and your pinkies will be very grateful

[1] https://github.com/chrisdone/god-mode

[justinhj]

finder-list-keywords - basically a menu of all the things in Emacs