Mike Zamansky is back with another video in his Using Emacs Series. This one is about completions, Marginalia, and Embark. As he said in his last video, he’s refactoring his Emacs configuration and trying to make it simpler so he’s rethinking the packages he uses.
One of the areas he’s revisiting is completions and his use of Ivy. He’s happy with Ivy but decided to see what else was available. It turns out that there are several alternatives now and he opted to try Vertico. It works pretty much like Ivy but is supposedly simpler and easier to integrate with other packages.
I have no desire to abandon Ivy. I really like it and it has served me well. Still, if you’re forward striving, you may want to see what Zamansky has to say about the other options.
For me, the meat of his video was his demonstration of Marginalia and Embark. Marginalia provides additional information—marginalia—to certain commands such as find-file. To be honest, I’m not sure how useful it is but it does seem neat and the other package, Embark, recommends enabling it.
Embark is a bit difficult to describe. Zamansky describes it as inverting the usual <operation> <object> paradigm to <object> <operation>. That’s pretty abstract but what it means is that you select some object—a URL, say—and then choose an operation to perform on it. Zamansky’s video has several examples of how it works and why it’s useful.
After watching the video, I installed Marginalia and Embark and am trying them out. The Marginalia documentation recommends using it with Vertico, Selectrum, or Icomplete-vertical but, so far, it seems to work fine with Ivy. I don’t really have enough experience with Embark to be sure it’s a worthwhile addition to my configuration but Zamansky is very enthusiastic so I’m going to give it a few days to decide.