This library is heavily inspired by Emacs’ minibuffer and Helm. It only deals with the backend side of things, it does not handle any display.
The key objects are prompters, sources and suggestions.
A prompt is an interface for user interactions that holds one or more
sources, and each of those are populated by suggestions.
Other central concepts include:
promptcurrent-suggestion- A single
suggestion, if any.
sourcemarks- A list of
suggestions, whenenable-marks-pis non-nil. actions- A list of functions that run on
suggestions.actions-on-return- Meant to be called over
marks(orcurrent-suggestion, whenenable-marks-pis nil) when successfully returningprompt. By default, it’s theidentityfunction. actions-on-marks- On
markschange (event-driven). actions-on-current-suggestion- On
current-suggestionchange (event-driven).
Example: Find below a graphical visualization of a single prompt with sources 1
and 2, and suggestions A, B, C and D. Marks is the list composed by
Suggestions A and C. The current-suggestion is Suggestion B.
Remarks:
When prompt has multiple sources, while current-suggestion is always
defined for prompt, it is empty for all but one of its sources.
Marks is a concept related to source not prompt, unlike that of
current-suggestion. Thus, from the point of view of a prompt’s object, the
marks are the union of the marks of each of the prompt’s =source=s.
Non-exhaustive list of features:
- Asynchronous suggestion computation.
- Multiple sources.
- Multiple return actions.
- Customizable matching and sorting.
- Multiple attributes to match and display (also known as “multiple column
display” like
helm-find-files). - Customizable initialization and cleanup functions.
- Notifications sent when suggestion list is updated.
- Per-source history.
- Resumable prompters.
- Marks actions (event-driven on marks change).
- Current suggestion actions (event-driven on current suggestion change).
- Automatically return the prompt when narrowed down to a single suggestion.