Ivy 0.9.0 is out

Intro

Ivy is a completion method that's similar to Ido, but with emphasis on simplicity and customizability.

Overview

The current release constitutes of 339 commits and almost a full year of progress since 0.8.0. Many issues ranging from #493 to #946 were fixed. The number of people who contributed code as grown to 63; thanks, everyone!

Details on changes

Changelog.org has been a part of the repository since 0.6.0, you can get the details of the current and past changes:

• in org-mode
• in HTML

Highlights

Many improvements are incremental and don't require any extra code to enable. I'll go over a few selected features that require a bit of information to make a good use of them.

A better action choice interface

For all ivy completions, pressing M-o allows to execute one of the custom actions for the current command. Now you have an option to use hydra for selecting an action. Use this code to turn on the feature:

(require 'ivy-hydra)

One big advantage of the new interface is that you can peak at the action list with M-o without dismissing the candidate list. Press M-o again to go back to candidate selection without selecting an action.

Here's some code from my config that ensures that I always have some extra actions to choose from:

(defun ora-insert (x)
  (insert
   (if (stringp x)
       x
     (car x))))

(defun ora-kill-new (x)
  (kill-new
   (if (stringp x)
       x
     (car x))))

(ivy-set-actions
 t
 '(("i" ora-insert "insert")
   ("w" ora-kill-new "copy")))

Grepping

The new counsel-rg joins the group of grepping commands in counsel (counsel-ag, counsel-git-grep, counsel-grep, counsel-pt). It wraps around the newly popular and very fast ripgrep shell tool.

A nice improvement to the grepping commands is the ability to specify extra flags when you press C-u (universal-argument) before the command. See this gif for an example of excluding *.el from the files searched by ag.

counsel-find-file

• Press M-o b to change the current directory to one of the virtual buffers' directories. You continue to select a file from that directory.

• Press M-o r to find the current file as root.

counsel-git-log

You can now customize counsel-git-log-cmd. See #652 for using this to make counsel-git-log work on Windows.

counsel-mode

• counsel-info-lookup-symbol now substitutes the built in info-lookup-symbol.
• Pressing C-r while in the minibuffer of eval-expression or shell-command now gives you completion of your previous history.

counsel-yank-pop

Use the new counsel-yank-pop-separator variable to make counsel-yank-pop look like this.

ivy

There was breaking change for alist type collections some months ago. Right now the action functions receive an item from the collection, instead of (cdr item) like before. If anything breaks, the easy fix is to add an extra cdr to the action function.

Unique index for alist completion was added. The uniqueness assumption is that the completion system is passed a list of unique strings, of which one (or more) are selected. Unlike plain string completion, alists may require violating the uniqueness assumption: there may be two elements with the same car but different cdr. Example: C function declaration and definition for tag completion. Until now, whenever two equal strings were sent to ivy-read, only the first one could be selected. Now, each alist car gets an integer index assigned to it as a text property 'idx. So it's possible to differentiate two alist items with the same key.

Action functions don't require using with-ivy-window anymore. This allows for a lot of simplification, e.g. use insert instead of (lambda (x) (with-ivy-window (insert x))).

ivy-switch-buffer

You can now customize faces in ivy-switch-buffer by the mode of each buffer. Here's a snippet from my config:

(setq ivy-switch-buffer-faces-alist
      '((emacs-lisp-mode . swiper-match-face-1)
        (dired-mode . ivy-subdir)
        (org-mode . org-level-4)))

Looks neat, I think:

swiper

Customize swiper-include-line-number-in-search if you'd like to match line numbers while using swiper.

New Commands

counsel-bookmark

Offers completion for bookmark-jump. Press M-o d to delete a bookmark and M-o e to edit it.

A custom option counsel-bookmark-avoid-dired, which is off by default, allows to continue completion for bookmarked directories. Turn it on with:

(setq counsel-bookmark-avoid-dired t)

and when you choose a bookmarked directory, the choice will be forwarded to counsel-find-file instead of opening a dired-mode buffer.

counsel-colors-emacs and counsel-colors-web

Completion for colors by name:

• the default action inserts the color name.
• M-o h inserts the color hex name.
• M-o N copies the color name to the kill ring.
• M-o H copies the color hex name to the kill ring.

The colors are displayed in the minibuffer, it looks really cool:

You also get 108 shades of grey to choose from, for some reason.

counsel-faces

Completion for faces by name:

counsel-command-history

Shows the history of the Emacs commands executed and lets you select and eval one again. See #826 for a nice screenshot.

counsel-company

Picks up company's candidates and inserts the result into the buffer.

counsel-dired-jump and counsel-file-jump

Jump to a directory or a file in the current directory.

counsel-dpkg and counsel-rpm

Wrap around the popular system package managers.

counsel-package

Install or uninstall Emacs packages with completion.

counsel-mark-ring

Navigate the current buffer's mark ring.

counsel-semantic

Navigate the current buffer's tags.

counsel-outline

Navigate the current buffer's outlines.

counsel-recentf

Completion for recentf.

counsel-find-library

Completion for find-library.

counsel-hydra-heads

Completion for the last hydra's heads.

counsel-org-agenda-headlines

Completion for headlines of files in your org-agenda-files.

Outro

Again, thanks to all the contributors. Happy hacking!