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Helm is a great framework for selection and autocompletion. Reading Anything page on Emacs Wiki, I know Helm evolved from Anything. The page advises user to update extensions written for Anything to be used with Helm but provided no instruction on how to do. Helm wiki doesn't provide any helpful information on writing extensions using Helm framework (it's not even user-editable, contains grammatical errors that no one fixes or pull requests are not accepted, which I find really unwelcome). I've been extensively using Helm recently and like it a lot, and I want to write a cheatsheet (similar to the excellent Clojure cheatsheet) to serve my workflow better. So my questions are:

  • Is the (outdated) Anything documentation applicable to current Helm? And how compatible is it?

  • Is there any useful documentation about Helm which explains how it works and how to write extensions using it? I've been Googling for a while but I couldn't find anything helpful enough.

I'm a Lisper and I don't mind reading source code at all. However, it's a time-consuming process so I just want to look for all the available information first before deciding to dig into the source code.

Community
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Ha-Duong Nguyen
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    +1 mainly to slightly compensate for the wanton close vote. – tripleee Nov 18 '13 at 06:44
  • Reading both Stack Overflow's [on-topic](http://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic) and [off-topic](http://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask) pages several times, I don't think my question is inappropriate. Or is it? – Ha-Duong Nguyen Nov 18 '13 at 06:50
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    ask the helm list: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.helm.user – Tom Nov 18 '13 at 06:59
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    BTW, I usually take a look at an existing source which is similar to what I want to do and use it as a template – Tom Nov 18 '13 at 07:14
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    Hi there, anything new ? It would be awesome if you could write such cheatsheet. – Ehvince Aug 12 '14 at 10:06
  • @Ehvince I have fairly grasped the idea of how Helm works now. I didn't have time to document it but will come back in several days. Thanks for the heads-up. – Ha-Duong Nguyen Aug 12 '14 at 11:22
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    Hello ! Did you write your documentation ? :) – Ehvince Jan 28 '15 at 13:11

4 Answers4

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As far as writing new extensions for helm I would recommend the 16 minute video that accompanies this: https://github.com/krisajenkins/helm-spotify

stsquad
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  • awesome tutorial. Mentions M-x helm-describe-helm-attribute ... aka keys for the alists that define sources. – Ben Hyde Aug 08 '14 at 14:49
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Regarding Helm daily use, check A Package in a league of its own

csantosb
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A very good tutorial was written by John Kitchin: http://wikemacs.org/wiki/How_to_write_helm_extensions

(first of the three original post blogs: http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2015/01/24/Anatomy-of-a-helm-source/)

He introduces:

  • the simplest kind of helm interface with a fixed set of candidates
  • A simple dynamic set of candidates
  • A simple fixed set of candidates from a list of cons cells.
  • Candidates and one action
  • More than one action
  • Handling multiple selections
  • Actions when there is no match

This is much appreciated, thanks John !

Ehvince
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The latest helm wiki is https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/wiki. That could be usefull for emacs helm users.

Mohanraj
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