Where to find Emacs Helm documentation

Question

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• Is the (outdated) Anything documentation applicable to current Helm?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.

Palenque

+1 mainly to slightly compensate for the wanton close vote. – Embellishment

Reading both Stack Overflow's on-topic and off-topic pages several times, I don't think my question is inappropriate. Or is it? – Palenque

ask the helm list: news.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.helm.user – Kamin

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 – Kamin

Hi there, anything new ? It would be awesome if you could write such cheatsheet. – Floranceflore

@Floranceflore 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. – Palenque

Hello ! Did you write your documentation ? :) – Floranceflore

Answer 1

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

Karlow

awesome tutorial. Mentions M-x helm-describe-helm-attribute ... aka keys for the alists that define sources. – Chickadee

Answer 2

Regarding Helm daily use, check A Package in a league of its own

Novitiate

Answer 3

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 !

Floranceflore

Answer 4

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

Photooffset

The documentation is badly written, outdated, not taken care, incomplete and doesn't allow community edit :-(. – Palenque