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Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, no details into why. Anyhow, for those who might want a replacement in case no one else picks up development for Helm, I highly recommend the Ivy package as an alternative in Emacs. I've always preferred it over Helm for being more minimal and speedier.

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I higly depend on `helm-org-rifle' [1]. Lets me search trough all my org files (headars and content) and presents the results beautifully in a temp buffer. - Would be very sad if development of helm would stop.

And yes, ivy is an awesome package. Higly recommend it.

[1]: https://github.com/alphapapa/org-rifle

I'm glad you find it useful.

1. Helm is not going to stop working anytime soon. I haven't even upgraded Helm in my configuration for a long time, and the version I have installed still works fine.

2. The latest version of Helm should continue working for even longer.

3. It shouldn't require much effort to make the occasional fix to Helm for compatibility with newer Emacs versions.

4. It's likely that Helm will continue to be maintained by someone, if not Thierry after some time away.

5. org-rifle already has a non-Helm interface built-in.

6. See also org-ql, which supersedes org-rifle to some extent.

counsel has `counsel-org-goto` and `counsel-org-goto-all` to search and jump to any section in the current org file and all org files, respectively. However I think they only search in headers, not in content, so they might not be a full replacement for helm-org-rifle, but it could be worth a try.

Ivy is at best an alternative to ido.

It requires using return/tab to complete things, which is precisely what helm does not do.

Like all keybinds in Emacs, this is a matter of defaults and preferences.

    (use-package helm
      :bind* (:map helm-map
                   ([tab] . helm-next-line)
                   ([backtab] . helm-previous-line)
                   ("C-S-SPC" . helm-next-source)))

After migrating to Doom, I'm spending quite some time waiting for Ivy's buffer list to pop up, then process my input or just the cursor movement keys. Not really seeing the ‘speedier’ part. Haven't yet looked into what's taking it so long.

As for the ‘minimal’ part, indeed Helm has niceties thrown in, like recent files in the buffer list (I happen to been using that), or seeing docs from some completion lists.

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