From helm to ivy

I started playing around with Ivy earlier today. I was motivated in part by reading through the author's blog, oremacs. I also love his swiper plugin and figured I had to give Ivy a try.

Background

For the record I discovered Helm about 20 minutes into my initial foray into emacs. I ❤ Helm. I support the project on Patreon. It's great. I'm all about mastering my tools though and to do that I need to at least try other tools. Enter my attempt to switch to Ivy.

Progress

This post isn't meant to be a finished product. I'm going to try and circle back occasionally as I use Ivy for the next couple days. A few notes on my experience so far:

• I somehow had an old version of Ivy installed and when I went to install counsel I was getting weird errors. Deleting Ivy from my elpa directory manually cleared things up.
• Wow, by default, Ivy feels much more sparse than Helm. The first thing I had to do was figure out the "buffers list" implementation and change my C-= binding from helm to ivy. It's definitely more spartan, but I don't think its a negative necessarily just a change.
• Ivy is just a completion package, by itself it doesn't do a ton. That's why it comes with counsel and swiper these are the primary interfaces to the good stuff, e.g. counsel-ag searches your project with Silver Searcher.
• Previews are incredible! Thanks to this comment on reddit. With the C-M-n and C-M-p commands you cycle through any matches and you see the entire file in the buffer. Imagine searching for a keyword in a project and then getting to see all the glorious context as you pick through the matches without having to open every single file!
• ~~Not sure how to completely prevent a package from loading. I don't want helm to load while I play with Ivy. The :disabled: keyword in use-package doesn't really prevent it from being loaded, it just prevents the use-package form from being executed. I ended up relying on git and removed the lines from my .emacs and I rm -rf the helm package directories.~~ I looked at this again after sleeping on it. I defined two variables simpson-evil and simpson-helm and I check those values in my config to set up configurations depending on which packages is available. Easy enough.
• I had a epiphany about how use-package works. use-package will auto load any package that has a :bind, :mode, :command, or :init keyword. If all you have is :config that package won't load itself. However adding :defer 1 will load that package once emacs is idle for a second and then fire off the :config body. So far so good. :disabled comes into play even if you have a :after keyword because if you have :after combined with any of the "auto load" keywords above the package will try to do stuff.