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Prelude Helm

Overview

Helm is an incremental completion and narrowing framework for Emacs. This module sets up Helm with sensible defaults and integrates it with Projectile.

Note

There are two Helm modules - prelude-helm (base setup) and prelude-helm-everywhere (replaces standard Emacs commands with Helm equivalents). You'll typically want to enable both. This module is an alternative to the Ido, Ivy, Vertico, and modules - you should only enable one completion framework.

Base Configuration (prelude-helm)

The base module provides:

  • Fuzzy matching for buffers
  • Helm Projectile integration (when Projectile is enabled)
  • Google suggest support via curl (when available)
  • The command prefix is remapped from C-x c to C-c h (to avoid accidental Emacs exit)

Key Bindings

Key Command Description
C-c h helm-command-prefix Helm command prefix
C-c h o helm-occur Search in current buffer
C-c h g helm-do-grep Grep with Helm
C-c h C-c w helm-wikipedia-suggest Wikipedia suggestions
C-c h SPC helm-all-mark-rings Browse mark rings

Helm Everywhere (prelude-helm-everywhere)

This module replaces many standard Emacs commands with Helm-powered equivalents:

Key Helm Command Replaces
M-x helm-M-x execute-extended-command
M-y helm-show-kill-ring yank-pop
C-x b helm-mini switch-to-buffer
C-x C-b helm-buffers-list list-buffers
C-x C-f helm-find-files find-file
C-h f helm-apropos describe-function
C-h r helm-info-emacs info-emacs-manual
C-c f helm-recentf Recent files

It also enables:

  • helm-mode globally (Helm-powered completing-read everywhere)
  • helm-descbinds-mode (Helm-powered describe-bindings)
  • Helm for shell/eshell history
  • Helm for etags