Re: A package in a league of its own: Helm

[York Zhao]

I've been using Helm for many years, and it has been a fundamental part of my
Emacs system. However, I also don't like `helm-find-file', and I agree ido is
much better in this. By the way, in `helm-find-file', you may want to try using
the left arrow to go to the parent directory, not as good as in ido but still
usable. Having said that, I think other than "find file", helm is great in
anything else.

On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 12:01 PM, Phillip Lord
<phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> First, thanks for the tutorial. I've tried helm (and anything) several
> times, but never got on with it as I have found the experience too
> confusing. I've always reverted to ido. I like the idea of helm because
> it is more pervasive than ido and can do several things at once. I
> dislike the practice of helm because too many things happen at once (and
> the wiki is incomprehensible).
>
> The thing that I am stuck on at the moment, is file navigation. With
> ido.el, I use [tab] or [del] to move up or down directories (and carry
> on selecting). With helm I have to use C-l C-j which I find much slower
> because of the double keypress and because C-k is in the middle.
>
> I don't get the behaviour you are talking about with helm. I get a
> single directory at once, and I have to navigate through it to get to
> the files I want.
>
> Clearly I doing something wrong!
>
> Phil
>
>
>
> <solidius4747@gmail.com> writes:
>> Consider this path: arch/x86/boot/main.c
>>
>> Can you type the file name first: "main.c", then add "x86" to get the correct
>> file above? I'm pretty sure ido+flx can't do that, but maybe I'm missing
>> something.
>>
>> With Helm, you can simply specify "mai x86" and it narrows to 3 candidates
>> with the above path at the top. The file is in Linux kernel source.
>>
>> Maybe you misunderstood my statement about precise remembering project
>> structure. What I meant was you have to remember the correct path ordering,
>> and that requires you to be familiar with the directory structure. Whlie in
>> Helm, I'm completely new to a directory and simply know nothing about
>> directory structure. With Helm, I can start pop up questions like "is there a
>> main.c that is relate to x86 arch?" and so on.
>>
>>
>
> --
> Phillip Lord,                           Phone: +44 (0) 191 222 7827
> Lecturer in Bioinformatics,             Email: phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk
> School of Computing Science,            
> http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord
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