Yesterday, I wrote about abo-abo’s recent enhancements to the Ivy UI. After I wrote that post, I saw this tweet:
Yesterday I moved from my Ido & smex based workflow to ivy, sniper, and counsel. Transitioning was mostly smooth, and its definitely an improvement over my old workflow. #emacs
— Christian Herenz (@Knusper2000) June 29, 2019
I went through the same process almost exactly 3 years ago and have never looked back. Ivy and friends are so much better than the default mechanisms that I’m always a little surprised by tweets like the above because I always assume that everyone has abandoned smex and ido by now. Apparently not.
That brings me to the point of this post. If you haven’t yet tried Swiper/Ivy/Counsel you’re missing out and owe it to yourself to give them a trial. I can’t think of any reason at all to stay with smex and ido—although I’m sure some folks have special use cases or needs where they make sense—and even people using helm might want to try the Ivy suite out. Just the way swiper does implicit regular expressions makes it worth while all by itself but there’s lots more. Take a look at the manual if you want to see what it can do. Don’t be put off by all the functionality. It’s easy to get started by just using it as a drop in replacement for isearch and things like find-file. You’ll discover the other functionality as you go along. Give it a try; you will, I promise, be glad you did.