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GitHub - raxod502/selectrum: 🔔 Better solution for incremental narrowing in Emac...

 4 years ago
source link: https://github.com/raxod502/selectrum
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README.md

Selectrum

Selectrum is a better solution for incremental narrowing in Emacs, replacing Helm, Ivy, and IDO.

What is it?

Selectrum provides an interface for selecting items from a list. You can use it to run a command with M-x:

Picking from alist of commands

You can use it to open a file with C-x C-f (find-file):

Navigating thefilesystem

Even TRAMP works great out of the box:

Using sudo viaTRAMP

You can switch buffers:

Switching toanother buffer

And every other command in Emacs is automatically enhanced, without the need for any configuration:

Findinglibraries, with load-path shadows

Getting started

Selectrum is not currently listed on MELPA. Therefore, the best way to install it is with straight.el:

(straight-use-package
  '(selectrum :host github :repo "raxod502/selectrum"))

To enable Selectrum, simply add to your init-file:

(selectrum-mode +1)

Now all of your favorite Emacs commands will automatically use Selectrum. However, the default sorting and filtering is very basic. It is recommended to use prescient.el to enable more intelligent sorting and filtering. Simply add this to your init-file:

(straight-use-package
  '(selectrum-prescient :host github :repo "raxod502/prescient.el"
                        :files ("selectrum-prescient.el")))

;; to make sorting and filtering more intelligent
(selectrum-prescient-mode +1)

;; to save your command history on disk, so the sorting gets more
;; intelligent over time
(prescient-persist-mode +1)

User guide

The design philosophy of Selectrum is to be as simple as possible, because selecting an item from a list really doesn't have to be that complicated, and you don't have time to learn all the hottest tricks and keybindings for this. What this means is that Selectrum always prioritizes consistency, simplicity, and understandability over making optimal choices for workflow streamlining. The idea is that when things go wrong, you'll find it easy to understand what happened and how to fix it.

Keybindings

  • To navigate to a candidate: use the standard motion commands (<up>, <down>, C-v, M-v, M-<, M->). If you prefer, you can use C-p and C-n instead of the arrow keys.
  • To accept the currently selected candidate: type RET.
  • To submit what you've typed, even if it's not a candidate: type C-j.
  • To abort: as per usual, type C-g.
  • To navigate into the currently selected directory while finding a file: type TAB. (What this actually does is insert the currently selected candidate into the minibuffer, which for find-file has the effect of navigating into a directory.)

Selectrum respects your custom keybindings, so if you've bound next-line to M-* for some reason, then pressing M-* will select the next candidate. If you don't like the standard Selectrum bindings, you can change them by customizing selectrum-minibuffer-bindings, and your changes will take effect right away.

The keybindings listed above are the only ones changed from standard editing bindings. So, for example:

  • All your standard horizontal motion, selection, insertion, and deletion commands work as usual.
  • To delete your current input, just use C-a C-k.
  • To go up a directory, use M-DEL to delete it in the minibuffer.
  • To navigate to your home directory, you can just use C-a C-k ~/.

Sorting and filtering

The default sorting and filtering in Selectrum is quite primitive. First candidates are sorted alphabetically, and then they are filtered down to those that contain your input as a substring. The part of each candidate that matches your input is highlighted. This default behavior is intended as a lowest common denominator that will definitely work.

However, it is strongly recommended that you set up prescient.el in order to get more intelligent sorting and filtering. (See the "getting started" section for how to do this.) With prescient.el:

  • Your most recent choices are saved, and those are sorted first. After that, your most frequent choices are saved, and those are sorted next. The rest of the candidates are sorted by length. This algorithm turns out to do very well in practice while being fast and not very magical.
  • Your input is split on spaces into subqueries, each of which must match as either a substring or an initialism (e.g. ffap matches find-file-at-point) in order for a candidate to be included. Again, this algorithm isn't optimal, but it does very well in practice given its simplicity and speed.
  • The part of each candidate that matched your input is highlighted, with the initials of an initialism highlighted in a second color.

It is possible to supply your own sorting, filtering, and highlighting logic if you would like. For that, see the developer guide later in this documentation.

Selectrum adds two special features on top of whatever sorting and filtering is selected:

  • If your input matches one of the candidates exactly, then that candidate is unconditionally sorted first. (So, if you type in find-file, then ido-find-file will never be sorted before find-file, no matter what.) This is intended to reduce frustration in the case that you know what you want and you don't want Selectrum getting in the way.
  • After that, if the caller of Selectrum specified a default candidate (for example, describe-function suggests the function near point as a default) then that candidate will be sorted before the rest. This means you can just press RET immediately to accept the default, like usual.

Selectrum doesn't have any special handling of case-sensitivity, because Emacs includes a system for this by default. The command M-x toggle-case-fold-search toggles globally between case-sensitive matching and case-insensitive matching.

Customization

  • By default, ten candidates are shown in the minibuffer at any given time. You can customize that by changing selectrum-num-candidates-displayed.
  • The currently selected candidate is highlighted with the face selectrum-current-candidate. If you don't like the color, you can adjust it to taste.
  • By default, the part of each candidate that matches your input is highlighted with the face selectrum-primary-highlight. There is also selectrum-secondary-highlight, which is not used by default but is provided for other packages that may use more complex highlighting schemes (such as prescient.el).

As an example of customizing the faces, I use the Zerodark color theme, which includes colors for Ivy, but not for Selectrum. I inspected the theme source code to see what colors were being used for Ivy, and copied them to be used for Selectrum as well:

(require 'zerodark-theme)

(let ((class '((class color) (min-colors 89))))
  (custom-theme-set-faces
   'zerodark
   `(selectrum-current-candidate
     ((,class (:background "#48384c"
                           :weight bold
                           :foreground "#c678dd"))))
   `(selectrum-primary-highlight ((,class (:foreground "#da8548"))))
   `(selectrum-secondary-highlight ((,class (:foreground "#98be65"))))))

(enable-theme 'zerodark)

But what is it doing to my Emacs??

By inspecting the source code of selectrum-mode, you will see that Selectrum operates by setting a number of standard Emacs variables (completing-read-function, read-file-name-function, etc.) and installing advice on a number of standard function (read-library-name, minibuffer-message, etc.).

If you object to these changes being made magically, you can make them yourself and refrain from enabling selectrum-mode. All of the functions and advice installed by Selectrum are part of the public API.

The autoloads of Selectrum are set up so that you can enable selectrum-mode without actually loading Selectrum. It will only be loaded once you use some of its functionality in an interactive command.

Developer guide

This section is intended for the authors of packages which integrate with Selectrum, or for end users who wish to customize the sorting and filtering behavior of Selectrum.

Usage of Selectrum

Selectrum provides a single entry point to its main functionality, the function selectrum-read. This function is rather like completing-read, but with a cleaner API. See the docstring for details. The various functions and advice installed by Selectrum just call into selectrum-read with various arguments, after translating whatever Emacs API they implement into Selectrum's least common denominator.

Unless you are extending Selectrum to support some very weird function which (ab)uses the completing-read framework in an interesting way, you shouldn't need to use selectrum-read directly, as all Emacs functions should call into it as appropriate when selectrum-mode is enabled.

Sorting, filtering, and highlighting

Selectrum exposes a very simple API for sorting, filtering, and highlighting. Each of these three tasks is controlled by a separate user option:

  • selectrum-preprocess-candidates-function takes the original list of candidates and sorts it (actually, it can do any sort of preprocessing it wants). This preprocessing only happens once.
  • selectrum-refine-candidates-function takes the preprocessed list and filters it using the user's input (actually, it can produce the final list of candidates however it wants, including generating it on the fly). This refinement happens every time the user input is updated.
  • selectrum-highlight-candidates-function takes a list of the refined candidates that are going to be displayed in the minibuffer, and propertizes them with highlighting.

For exact specifications of these functions, including whether or not the input list may be modified, please see their docstrings. This information is important, because if you make copies of the candidate list unnecessarily, there will be noticeable lag due to the slowness of Emacs' garbage collector.

Text properties

What has been described so far suffices for most cases. However, some types of candidate selection (in particular, find-file) are more complex. This complexity is minimized by abstracting the essential requirements of the find-file implementation into a simple API.

The API is based primarily on the following three text properties, which may be applied to candidates using propertize:

  • selectrum-candidate-display-prefix: controls how the candidate is displayed in the list shown in the minibuffer. If this property is present, then its value is prepended to the candidate when it is displayed. This is used, for example, to display disambiguating parent directories in read-library-name.
  • selectrum-candidate-display-suffix: same as the display prefix, but it's postpended instead of prepended when the candidate is dispalyed. This is used, for example, to display a trailing slash on directories in find-file.
  • selectrum-candidate-full: controls how the candidate appears in the user input area of the minibuffer. If this property is present, then it specifies the canonical representation of the candidate. This is the value that will be returned from selectrum-read. It is also the value that will be inserted when the user presses TAB. In find-file, the canonical representation of each candidate is its absolute path on the filesystem.

Note that sorting, filtering, and highlighting is done on the standard values of candidates, before any of these text properties are handled.

There is one final detail: the selectrum-refine-candidates-function may return, in addition to the refined list of candidates, a transformed user input which will be used for highlighting (for find-file, this is the basename of the file in the user input).

To really understand how these pieces work together, it is best to inspect the source code of selectrum-read-buffer and selectrum-read-file-name (an effort has been made to make the code readable). Note that both of these functions operate by temporarily rebinding selectrum-candidate-preprocess-function and selectrum-candidate-refine-function in order to generate candidates on the fly and then sort and filter them using the original values of these functions.

Hooks

Selectrum provides two hooks for getting information about what candidates were selected. These are intended primarily for packages like prescient.el which want to record history statistics. The hooks are:

  • selectrum-candidate-selected-hook
  • selectrum-candidate-inserted-hook

For more information, see their docstrings.

Caveats

  • There is no support for multiple selection or alternate actions. This is unlikely to ever change, because supporting these features requires violating the completing-read abstraction rather aggressively, and that goes against Selectrum's design philosophy of simplicity and consistency.
  • Recursive minibuffers are not currently supported. This is because such support would complicate the implementation significantly (currently all state is stored in a small set of global variables, and this scheme would need to be replaced with some kind of stack). I am not necessarily opposed to adding recursive minibuffer support if it can be done relatively cleanly and somebody points out a concrete use case that benefits from the support.
  • In Emacs 25, M-x ffap is basically completely broken. This is because in old versions of Emacs, ffap worked by calling completing-read directly with a special completion table function, rather than just using read-file-name like would be reasonable. Since Emacs 25 is going to die eventually, I'm not going to bother fixing this, although pull requests would be accepted.

Why use Selectrum?

This section documents why I decided to write Selectrum instead of using any of the numerous existing solutions in Emacs.

Why not IDO?

IDO is a package for interactive selection that is included in Emacs by default. It's a great improvement on the default completing-read experience. However, I don't like how it displays candidates in a horizontal instead of a vertical manner. It feels less intuitive to me. Furthermore, IDO is still integrated with the default completing-read framework, which means it doesn't take full advantage of a new UI paradigm.

Why not Helm?

Helm is an installable package which provides an alternate vertical interface for candidate selection. It has the advantage of having very many features and a large number of packages which integrate with it. However, the problem with Helm for me is exactly that it has too many features. Upon opening a Helm menu, I am immediately confronted by numerous colors, diagnostics, options, and pieces of help text. It is too complicated for the problem I want solved.

Why not Ivy?

Ivy is the most promising alternative to Selectrum, and it's what I used before developing Selectrum. It is marketed as a minimal alternative to Helm which provides a simpler interface. The problem with Ivy is its architecture, API, and implementation, all of which are very poorly designed. Ivy was originally designed to be used as a backend to Swiper, a buffer search package that originally used Helm. Unfortunately, when Ivy became a more general-purpose interactive selectrum package, its abstractions were not reworked to make sense in this new context. Over time, more and more special cases were added to try to make various commands work properly, and not nearly enough effort has been put in to making the core functionality consistent and correct. As a result, the ivy-read API has around 20 arguments and a heap of special cases for particular values (which are completely undocumented). Numerous functions in Ivy, Counsel, and Swiper have special cases hardcoded into them to detect when they're being called from specific other functions in the other two packages. As a result of all this, Ivy is incredibly flaky and full of edge-case bugs like this one. It is these bugs and quirks in UX that led me to develop Selectrum.

Fundamentally, selecting an item from a list is not a complicated problem, and it does not require a complicated solution. That's why Selectrum is around 900 lines of code even though Ivy+Counsel (which do basically the same thing) are around 11,000 lines together. Selectrum achieves its conciseness by:

  • working with the existing Emacs APIs for completion, rather than replacing all of them and then reimplementing every Emacs command that uses them (incidentally, this also reduces the number of bugs and inconsistencies)
  • preferring simplicity and consistency over the "best" possible UX for each individual command (which also makes it easier to understand what Selectrum is doing and work around the sharp corners)
  • designing the best possible interface for candidate selection from the ground up, rather than repurposing an API that was used for something else and then just sticking new things onto it every time a bug appears

In addition, Selectrum does not support multiple selection or alternate actions, unlike Ivy. This is because supporting either of these features means you need to throw out the existing completing-read API, which is an absolutely massive time-sink and source of bugs that adds very little to the user experience. Selectrum works with every Emacs command with approximately no special cases, specifically because it focuses on doing the common case as well as possible.

As a final note, when you're using selectrum-prescient.el, there's an easy way to simulate Ivy's alternate actions. Suppose you've typed M-x and found the command you want, but now you realize you want to look up the documentation instead. Press TAB to insert the candidate, which has the side effect of placing it at the top of the recency table in prescient.el. Then C-g out of Selectrum and type C-h f. The same command will automatically be at the top of the list, so you can get the documentation just by pressing RET. I believe that this sort of idea can be extended to get all of the utility out of these extra features without actually implementing explicit support for them (with all of the attendant complexity and bugs).

Why not Icicles?

Because it's maintained on EmacsWiki, enough said.


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