:completion vertico
A search engine for deckers
1. Description
This module enhances the Emacs search and completion experience, and also provides a united interface for project search and replace, powered by ripgrep.
It does this with several modular packages focused on enhancing the built-in
completing-read
interface, rather than replacing it with a parallel ecosystem
like ivy and helm do. The primary packages are:
- Vertico, which provides the vertical completion user interface.
- Consult, which provides a suite of useful commands using
completing-read
. - Embark, which provides a set of minibuffer actions.
- Marginalia, which provides annotations to completion candidates.
- Orderless, which provides better filtering methods.
1.1. Maintainers
1.2. Module flags
- +icons
- Adds icons to
file
andbuffer
category completion selections.
1.3. Packages
1.4. Hacks
No hacks documented for this module.
2. Prerequisites
Some of the advanced filtering features in async consult commands require
grep and ripgrep to be built with support for PCRE lookahead, see Async
search commands for more information. You can check if this is true for your
machine by running doom doctor
.
3. Usage
The packages in this module modify and use the built-in completing-read
function, which is used by any function that requires completion. Due to this
the full scope of these packages is too large to cover here and you are
encouraged to go and read their excellent documentation. We will detail
Doom-specific additions:
3.1. Vertico keybindings
When in an active Vertico completion session, the following doom added keybindings are available:
Keybind | Description |
---|---|
C-k | (evil) Go to previous candidate |
C-j | (evil) Go to next candidate |
C-M-k | (evil) Go to previous group |
C-M-j | (evil) Go to next group |
C-; or <leader> a | Open an embark-act menu to choose a useful action |
C-c C-; | export the current candidate list to a buffer |
C-SPC | Preview the current candidate |
embark-act
will prompt you with a which-key menu with useful commands on the
selected candidate or candidate list, depending on the completion category. Note
that you can press C-h instead of choosing a command to filter through the
options with a Vertico buffer, that also has slightly more detailed descriptions
due to Marginalia annotations.
3.3. Project search & replace
This module provides interactive text search and replace using ripgrep.
Keybind | Description |
---|---|
SPC s p | Search project |
SPC s P | Search another project |
SPC s d | Search this directory |
SPC s D | Search another directory |
Prefixing these keys with the universal argument (SPC u for evil users; C-u otherwise) changes the behavior of these commands, instructing the underlying search engine to include ignored files.
This module also provides Ex Commands for evil users:
Ex command | Description |
---|---|
:pg[rep][!] [QUERY] |
Search project (if ! , include hidden files) |
:pg[rep]d[!] [QUERY] |
Search from current directory (if ! , don’t search recursively) |
The optional bang (!
) is equivalent to the universal argument for the previous
commands.
On top of the usual Vertico keybindings, search commands also offer support for exporting the current candidate list to an editable buffer C-c C-e. After editing the changes can be committed with C-c C-c and aborted with C-c C-k (alternatively ZZ and ZQ, for evil users). It uses wgrep for grep searches, wdired for file searches, and occur for buffer searches.
3.4. In-buffer searching
3.5. Vertico integration for various completing commands
3.5.1. General
Keybind | Description |
---|---|
M-x or SPC : | Enhanced M-x |
SPC ’ | Resume last Vertico session |
3.5.2. Jump to files, buffers or projects
Evil keybind | Non-evil keybind | Description |
---|---|---|
SPC RET | C-c s b | Find bookmark |
SPC f f or SPC . | C-x C-f | Browse from current directory |
SPC p f or SPC SPC | C-c p f | Find file in project |
SPC f r | C-c f r | Find recently opened file |
SPC p p | C-c p p | Open another project |
SPC b b or SPC , | C-x b | Switch to buffer in current workspace |
SPC b B or SPC < | C-x B | Switch to buffer |
<leader> b b and <leader> , support changing the workspace you’re selecting a buffer from via Consult narrowing, e.g. if you’re on the first workspace, you can switch to selecting a buffer from the third workspace by typing 3 SPC into the prompt, or the last workspace by typing 0 SPC.
<leader> f f and <leader> . support exporting to a wdired buffer using C-c C-e.
3.5.3. Search
Keybind | Description |
---|---|
<leader> p t | List all TODO/FIXMEs in project |
<leader> s b | Search the current buffer |
<leader> s d | Search this directory |
<leader> s D | Search another directory |
<leader> s i | Search for symbol in current buffer |
<leader> s p | Search project |
<leader> s P | Search another project |
<leader> s s | Search the current buffer (incrementally) |
3.5.4. File Path Completion
Note that Emacs allows you to switch directories with shadow paths, for example
starting at /foo/bar/baz, typing /foo/bar/baz/~/ will switch the searched
path to the home directory. For more information see substitute-in-file-name
and file-name-shadow-mode
. This module will erase the “shadowed” portion of
the path from the minibuffer, so in the previous example the path will be reset
to ~/.
3.6. Consult
3.6.1. Multiple candidate search
This module modifies the default keybindings used in
consult-completing-read-multiple
:
Keybind | Description |
---|---|
TAB | Select or deselect current candidate |
RET | Enters selected candidates (also toggles current candidate) |
3.6.2. Async search commands
Consult async commands (e.g. consult-ripgrep
) will have a preceding separator
character (usually #) before the search input. This is known as the perl
splitting style. Input typed after the separator will be fed to the async
command until you type a second seperator, afterwhich the candidate list will be
filtered with Emacs instead (and can be filtered using orderless, for
example). The specific seperator character can be changed by editing it, and
might be different if the initial input already contains #.
Note that grep-like async commands translate the input (between the first and second #) to an Orderless-light expression: space separated inputs are all matched in any order. If the grep backend does not support PCRE lookahead, it’ll only accept 3 space separated inputs to prevent long lookup times, and further filtering should be done after a second #.
For more information see here.
3.7. Marginalia
Keybind | Description |
---|---|
M-A | Cycle between annotation levels |
Marginalia annotations for symbols (e.g. SPC h f and SPC h v) come with
extra information the nature of the symbol. For the meaning of the annotations
see marginalia--symbol-class
.
3.8. Orderless filtering
When using orderless to filter through candidates, the default behaviour is for each space separated input to match the candidate as a regular expression or literally.
Note that due to this style of matching, pressing tab does not expand the input
to the longest matching prefix (like shell completion), but rather uses the
first matched candidate as input. Filtering further is instead achieved by
pressing space and entering another input. In essence, when trying to match
foobar.org
, instead of option 1., use option 2.:
- (BAD) Enter
foo TAB
, completes tofoobar.
, enterorg RET
- (GOOD) Enter
foo SPC org RET
Doom has some builtin style dispatchers for more finegrained filtering, which you can use to further specify each space separated input in the following ways:
Input | Description |
---|---|
!foo | match without literal input foo |
%foo or foo% | perform char-fold-to-regexp on input foo |
`foo or foo` | match input foo as an initialism |
=foo or foo= | match only with literal input foo |
~foo or foo~ | match input foo with fuzzy/flex matching |
4. Configuration
If you want to further configure this module, here are some good places to start:
4.1. Vertico
Vertico provides several extentions that can be used to extend it’s interface
4.2. Consult
Much of the behaviour of Consult commands can be changed with
consult-customize
. This module already does this, if you want to override the
module’s modifications, do:
If you are changing the preview key (set to C-SPC), remember to change the
binding on vertico-map
as well, as the binding there gets previews to work to
an extent on non-consult commands as well.
4.3. Marginalia
You can add more Marginalia annotation levels and change the existing ones by
editing marginalia-annotator-registry
4.4. Embark
You can change the available commands in Embark for category $cat
by editing
embark-$cat-map
, and even add new categories. Note that you add categories by
defining them through marginalia, and embark picks up on them.
5. Troubleshooting
There are no known problems with this module. Report one?
6. TODO Appendix
This module has no appendix yet. Write one?