vertico

This is a good point, but I do want to mention that I feel like in the past 5 years we've had lots of extremely popular packages that hook into Emacs internals instead of rolling out their own architecture. For example, corfu [0] versus company [1]. Company works with capf, but you can also write your own backends for it (specific to company). Corfu also works with capf, but all backends are capf functions instead of a corfu specific backend. Another good example is eglot [2] versus lsp-mode [3]. Eglot is actually packaged with Emacs now. There's also other stuff, like vertico [4] (and others that are recommended to download) versus helm/ivy. I also want to mention that packages that hook into Emacs more don't necessarily mean that they're better. From my POV it's more like you get a lot more things for free and the documentation you dive

TUIs in Prolog sounds fun. The great thing about TUIs is that a simple text component is a universal widget. If the user can display text and capture events they can implement any interface components they want in terms of that. That said, whatever the framework provides pushes users in a particular direction. The core of the things I'm thinking of (some links below) is providing easily accessible context for the user right at the point where they are working. This can be completions at the cursor, or a quick key to pop up a command palette. Fuzzy search is standard. Here are some examples: * Corfu: https://github.com/minad/corfu * Vertico: https://github.com/minad/vertico * which-key: https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key * LazyVim: https://www.lazyvim.org/ I've included links that have screenshots showing how they work. The list is

> there's packages that show you what options you have for what key to press next Rejoice! The excellent which-key package that does this comes bundled with Emacs 30! (Emacs 30 will probably be released soon.) > enter command… default UX is a bit weak Agreed: the packages Helm, Ivy, and Vertico make this interface much nicer. I use Vertico [1] personally. Though, from Emacs 29, there are some really nice options you can set. I used the following in my Bedrock starter kit [2] to get nicer tab-completion: as soon as you hit TAB twice you'll get bumped into the Completion buffer to select something with your cursor. Here's the relevant config: (setopt completion-auto-help 'always) ; Open completion always; `lazy' another option (setopt completions-max-height 20) ; This is arbitrary (setopt com

I use it at my current job in which I work in a large C++ codebase. I formerly used CLion. Whether Emacs is an IDE or not depends how you define IDE. I use Eglot [0] for LSP integration; this gives me IDE-like features like "jump-to-definition", syntax error highlights, warnings, etc. and integrates with company-mode [1] for code completion. This handles most of my needs for writing code. As for other things like a file tree, I've found that the built in `project-find-file` command combined with `vertico` [2] and `orderless` [3] makes finding files and navigating around projects easier; that pair behaves similarly to CMD+P in Sublime Text or VS Code. There are file tree packages out there, but I've found that I don't really need a file tree in practice and that I prefer navigating around projects with fuzzy file search and grep. [0] https

Helm is a huge package. If you want something that stays closer to a vanilla experience, check out Daniel Mendler’s Vertico package: https://github.com/minad/vertico He’s got a bunch of other really nice lightweight packages that leverage built-in completion mechanisms. See also https://github.com/minad/vertico#complementary-packages

I'll second this. Take a look at Vertico [1] and Consult [2] which really improve discoverability. Other nice packages (links found on the Vertico page) include Marginalia and Orderless. [1]: https://github.com/minad/vertico [2]: https://github.com/minad/consult