How should we respond to the archiving of Helm?

syl20bnr / spacemacs

A community-driven Emacs distribution - The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs *and* Vim!

http://spacemacs.org

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How should we respond to the archiving of Helm? #13943

Closed Kazark closed 3 years ago

Kazark commented 4 years ago

Background: https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/issues/2386

Helm is the default in Spacemacs, so this is something we will need to respond to. Should we:

use a fork? I haven't heard of it being forked yet, but surely it will be.
Make Ivy the default? I've never tried Ivy and don't know anything about this option.
Add support for Selectrum?

Thought I should start a discussion.

Kazark commented 4 years ago

https://github.com/raxod502/ctrlf is a replacement for helm-swoop.

jb55 commented 4 years ago

Make Ivy the default? I've never tried Ivy and don't know anything about this option

I switched to ivy in spacemacs awhile ago and it works fine. Seems like the most reasonable option.

Kazark commented 4 years ago

@jb55 are there any features you miss?

smile13241324 commented 4 years ago

Don't know if this is the right moment to do so, I still expect that someone will adopt this package.

Personally I don't think that Selectrum is an alternative, it follows the same design principle ivy does this is less features, be fast and simple. That's normally not the design expected by people using helm, rather something among the line of provide a lot of choices to do exactly what I want, be allowed to be slow but comprehensive.

Lets try to gather alternative comprehensive search and narrowing frameworks for emacs. Maybe we find a replacement for helm after all.

Btw that doesn't mean we could not support Selectrum but it sounds pretty undistinguishable from standard ivy from my perspective.

Kazark commented 4 years ago

@smile13241324 Selectrum's README links to another of comparable projects.

syl20bnr commented 4 years ago

This is big and sad news. I'm a Helm user myself. For sure Helm is a great package but it is also huge, I really hope someone can take over 🤞

We won't phase it out any time soon though but it is always good to see the alternatives. Fortunately we have very good support for Ivy too.

Let's see what happens following this news.

Kazark commented 3 years ago

Given that Helm is back, in some capacity, I'm thinking there's nothing for us to do at this time.