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Comment by clocksld | Hacker News Reader

I can't say that I have experienced all of these issues myself after using helm for about a year.

- There certainly are performance issues with helm, but setting gc-cons-threshold to a higher value helps my setup a lot.

- I update all my installed packages pretty frequently, and I just use regular melpa. I haven't really noticed bugs with Helm.

- As for the fuzzy matching, look into the "helm-flx" package. It gives you real fuzzy matching, much better than the default helm matching.

- I have M-x bound to helm-M-x, which is a better option than the default. Also, helm-mini is a better option for a buffer switcher.

I agree that Helm is lacking in many areas, but this guide made Helm work better for me: https://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html

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Ah, helm-flx didn't exist when I quit helm, and flx-ido did. Question: does helm-flx sort results, or does it just throw back an unsorted list of matching entries, like normal helm? I consider the sorting an even bigger and more ridiculous drawback than the matching.

I haven't used helm-M-x. That may be better - but it doesn't solve the problem that everything else using completing-read is still on normal helm.

I typically use a small emacs window next to a terminal (or few - I don't run terminals in emacs) and browser in my tiling wm. Helm makes this nearly impossible, since it's very difficult to control where helm windows will go without using popwin (horrifically buggy) or shackle (I never tried this, as I'd already moved to ido by the time it showed up), because of helm's nonstandard way of doing things.

With regards to the bugginess, I can anecdotally say that I've seen more asking about problems with helm on the #emacs IRC channel than any other package - and there are several of equivalent popularity (magit, for instance). I also experienced numerous bugs while I was using helm, including some that broke my emacs config. The only package I've had break my config more than helm is org, but org generally works quite well if you can get it loaded without problems.

helm-flx sorts results by the "closest" match to your typed in characters. For me, typing "tetri" has "tetris" listed first, with the next result matching all of those characters in a different command, and each of the following results being less and less accurate matches. There is no alphabetical sorting, though.

Popwin is very annoying for me, too. I'll look into trying out shackle.

There is also a less-popular completion system for emacs called ivy. I don't know how it stacks up to ido or helm, but perhaps that one is also worth checking out.

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