swiper

I saw what was possible with emacs via systemcrafters: https://systemcrafters.net/emacs-from-scratch/ And I should note I have been using it for about 25 years, and was mostly in the dark about what it was capable of, though many of those years were in environments where I was using versions 5-10 years out of date, and completely locked down/out of things like melpa. As far as keeping up with whats latest and greatest, I think the real answer is there isn't a good online resource. There are emacs meetups and conferences and some are virtual, and you can ask around other power users and see what they are doing. I even find emacs packages to be pretty poor at selling themselves on why you should use them. As an example, Ivy and Counsel are kind of game changers to the UI, but I don't think you get any idea of that from their manual or main

I love these interfaces and use them wherever I can. On MacOS I use Alfred for launching applications, killing processes, controlling music playback, searching the web and my filesystem, swapping file tabs, and tons more. Spotlight search, which is built in, is also very competent. For the command line I use fzf which can add fuzzy search for all sorts of things. built in its ctrl+r functionality I find very useful. As well as kill commands where i can fuzzy search by the name of the program and it'll type in the pid for you. fasd is useful for navigating through directories, though it doesn't pop up a palette. For those interested here is a small list of them, though not comprehensive, that I've found useful: Launchers MacOS - https://www.alfredapp.com/ - https://raycast.com/ - https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html - https://lac

It's primarily useful to people who already use emacs a lot, I think. Not sure I'd recommend using emacs just for EXWM, as some people seem to do with magit or org-mode. The main problem it solves is that emacs is a tiling window manager (in a loose, non X-specific sense), so if you spend the majority of your time in emacs it gets quite annoying that you're having to use two different paradigms to manage windows: one for managing emacs "windows" and the "buffers" that they "visit" and one for managing X windows, of which emacs itself is one. EXWM makes X windows behave (mostly) as if they are emacs buffers, so you can use the same powerful tools to manage them. As an example, I use ivy (https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper) so for switching between buffers I get a nice incremental fuzzy-matched buffer list. With EXWM that same buffer list al

Every X window is a buffer, so you have all of emacs's powerful buffer switching programs (see: ido, helm [1], ivy [2]) for focusing windows. Also there are multiple interesting solutions to managing window splits [6], moving windows [3][4], saving their configuration [5], etc. [1]: https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm [2]: https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper [3]: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WindMove [4]: https://github.com/abo-abo/ace-window [5]: https://github.com/Bad-ptr/persp-mode.el [6]: winner-mode, one of my favorite things. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WinnerMode

You can navigate to files in Emacs using `find-file` (C-x C-f with standard key bindings). That should prompt you to enter a path, which, without any customization, should perform very similar to a shell prompt in terms of using tab for file completions. A huge improvement to this in my opinion is the use of a completion framework package. I use ivy[0] but helm is also popular and there are others. The main draw in this case is instead of having to tab through completion candidates, they appear as a vertical list which is updated as you type. It also allows more advanced filtering, for example by regex which I find a lot easier to use than shell completion which only supports prefix. For example say I want to navigate to a directory called `the-project` but I always forget whether it's named `the-project` or `a-project`, it doesn't matt

Abo-abo's Emacs packages are truly fantastic. One that I personally love is Ivy-mode (with Counsel and Swiper): https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper

> The real gripe for me about emacs is that it is single threaded. So a long grep launched off will freeze the entire editor. Are you running grep with `shell-command` (M-!)? Using M-x grep, `async-shell-command` (M-&), and invoking grep directly in shell, eshell, term and ansi-term all leave emacs as responsive as normal for me. shell-command is the only one that seems to hang. I'll also add ivy[1] and helm[2] as alternatives to Ido which are very popular completion systems with integrations that span the package ecosystem. [1]: https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper [2]: https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm

If you like Helm, check out Ivy, Counsel, and Swiper.[1] They do many of the things that Helm does, but are a lot faster, less buggy, and have a less unorthodox UI. Also check out Hydra (by the same author).[2] That's really revolutionized my Emacs experience recently. It's customizable menu system you can add anywhere. I've put all those Emacs functions I keep forgetting exist in to it and now they're all at my fingertips. [1] - https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper [2] - https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra

Ivy, part of swiper, is also good and more light weight, it's what I use for completion now. (though I used helm for ages and really liked it too). https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper