Re: Time to consider/try Helm?

[Ben Bacarisse]

Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> On Tuesday, 30 Oct 2018 at 04:21, Skip Montanaro wrote:
>>>
>>> My journey was vanilla -> Ido -> Icicles -> Ivy.
>>
>> Completely naive question, but what do these packages provide? I've been
>> using Emacs for 30+ years and I've never heard of any of them. I guess I
>> need to get out more.
>
> if it's any consolation, I've also been using Emacs for 30+ years and
> I've only managed to get to ido so far... ;-)

I'm not quite up to 30 years (not much off, mind) but I keep trying
these sorts of thing and I keep going back to the default.

In part it's just muscle memory.  I just tried Ivy again and can't stop
myself from hitting TAB TAB which "acts on" an item in Ivy.  I kept
loading executable files like "program" rather than "program.c".  I
think these more sophisticated frameworks would benefit from a set of
"compatibility" key binding and definitions so that you could go step by
step trying out the new parts without getting frustrated by old habits.

Mind you I got further this time...  Last time I got frustrated by my
habit of using M-x <up> to get the last (and other previous) commands.
But this time I read enough of the documentation to find that M-p does
that in Ivy's mini buffer.  Still going to be hitting <up> a lot but at
least that does not execute any action that I might not want.

Maybe this time I'll stick it out...

-- 
Ben.