This is a sort of public service announcement. As many of you know, I consider Ivy/Counsel/Swiper to be one of my most valuable packages. It’s a behind the scenes force in almost everything I do in Emacs. If it disappeared, my workflow would be seriously impacted for the worse.
Not everyone agrees. Alex Popescu recently disabled it on his system for reasons he says are too boring to go into. One of the problems that appeared immediately concerned completions. While Ivy handles this transparently, the default behavior is to pop up a temporary buffer with the completions. The problem was that the only obvious way Popescu could find to get to that buffer was to use the mouse. Like most Emacs users, he considered that an anathema.
He tried pop-to-buffer, which worked, but then he realized, that being Emacs, there was almost certainly a builtin command for such a fundamental action. There is, of course. The proper command is switch-to-completions. Popescu says that it is already bound to Meta+v but that’s not the case on my system. Perhaps Ivy modified it. In any event, be aware that you may have to bind it yourself.
If for one reason or another you’re not using Ivy or one of the similar packages this is a useful thing to know.
Update : Added link to Popescu’s post.