Here I group and integrate Helm search commands to escalate my search to more and more computer contents.

My searches in Emacs are far from ideal. When I started with it, Helm was the cool kid of the block. So I installed that and had a great time with it so far. I would say that all these years I have been using mostly helm-find-files and helm-buffers-list. With time I kept adding commands: Silver Searcher helm-ag and Projectile helm-projectile and some more. Still, my working memory is pretty limited and I consistently failed to use these other helm extensions. I got to the point where I need a way of searching for helm commands!

Indeed, this is the problem of my searches. Let's run through what I would do to search something.

1. I start with wanting to change the variable helm-candidate-number-limit in my configuration
2. I search for my configuration with helm-buffers-list
3. my configuration is not an open buffer yet, so I search for the configuration with helm-find-files
4. now I use helm-occur or helm-swoop to find the use-package helm
5. oh, I forgot what helm-candidate-number-limit is about, I want to search it online

This is messy. If I didn't memorize the keybindings for all those commands, I would be lost. Also, new users may just not know about they exist or their names! And why do I need to search so many times?

How about making the same search in a single go and user friendly? Is that possible?

The problem is bigger. We are living a golden age of Emacs (and software in general). We have an incredible amount of powerful software tools. We can mentally group them but that's it. In my moldable-emacs work I try to make tools contextual (i.e., you can use them when they are relevant). That is because I want to save my attention and dedicate it to the problem I am facing (instead of the new problem: what tool I need to handle my problem).

I think it would save everybody's time if we had tools that grouped tools. We need to review our user interfaces!

Take searching as an example. When I search for a string, I should not tell the computer the file or directory to look into: the location is just what I want to find out! The computer search command asks us a starting location to save us some waiting time. But the computer is giving us work! We need to remember the whereabouts. Now WE are computing, sigh!

A better interface (taking this idea from The Humane Interface) would be just a search bar. I write text into it, the computer starts its hunting. Escalating from the small to the large, from the current file you are visiting to the whole Internet.

This interface would allow you to ignore the tools used in the process. You would finally focus only on your problem.

Can we do that for searches in Emacs?

This kept me awake way past my bed time last week. It was worthy though. Let me show you.

In the video, I start a search in my buffer with helm. The word (Tarsius) is not there. Instead of losing my search, I escalate it: next I search all the open buffers. Still nothing (actually found it here but say we didn't). Next I search the file system files. Still nothing, now it is my last resort: the Internet.

All this happens with just helm: how cool is that?

What I did is just to create a map between Helm commands and descriptions.

(defcustom escalator-commands-map
  '((:description "search current buffer" :fn escalator-helm-swoop)
    (:description "find file" :fn escalator-helm-find-files)
    (:description "search buffers in dir" :fn escalator-helm-buffers-list )
    (:description "search files content in dir" :fn escalator-helm-do-grep-ag )
    (:description "search files in project" :fn escalator-helm-projectile-find-file )
    (:description "search files content in project" :fn escalator-helm-projectile-ag )
    (:description "search in all buffers" :fn helm-multi-swoop-all)
    (:description "search filenames in fs" :fn escalator-helm-find-root )
    (:description "search file contents in fs" :fn escalator-helm-do-grep-ag-root )
    (:description "search google" :fn escalator-helm-google-suggest ))
  "Escalator helm commands.")

As you noticed the search query stays when I switch search command. I needed to redefine helm commands with the escalator- prefix because these don't take the query as input.

For instance, see how I defined escalator-helm-find-files.

(defun escalator-helm-find-files (&optional input)
  (helm :sources 'helm-source-findutils
        :input input
        :buffer "*helm find*"
        :ff-transformer-show-only-basename nil
        :case-fold-search helm-file-name-case-fold-search))

The original helm-find-files would not have the property :input, which defines the starting string query.

You can add other helm commands yourself by adding an extra element to the escalator-command-map. I already added something like helm-mu and even helm-tree-sitter before the helm-google-suggest, because it may make sense to query my emails as well before the Internet.

The current work is published as a hack at: https://github.com/ag91/escalator

I guess my next step is to escalate searches automatically: if the command finishes without candidates, escalate to the next command. So I will get closer to that single search bar ideal situation!

Think about integrating your favourite tools and abstract them away. The more you focus just on the problem you care about, the more effective you will be!

Happy searching!