alien-sel: A list choice library for emacs.

Call alien-sel with a prompt and a list of choices, and a vertical list is shown for choosing with arrow keys. The minibuffer is activated for filtering.

Features:

• Filter options by typing in the minibuffer. Substring, regexp and flex matching available.
• The selection list can appear in a normal window, or a ‘popup’ window where the cursor is. Popup have a couple of styles.

  

  

  

• Push filters to narrow selection.
• Text of the items can be propertized. Properties are preserved in the return value.
• The property alien-sel-val allows to specify a value to return different from the value to show.
• The property alien-sel-subtext allows to specify a secondary line of text to display besides the items.

Goals:

• Emacs’ ido is great, but the minibuffer is too far away from the editing most of the time.
• Small library, but with categorization, filtering, and extra information for items. Most of this is not yet implemented.

Keys:

Option selection:

return	Select the highlighted item and exit.
up	Move selection up.
down	Move selection down.
next	Move selection down a few lines.
prior	Move selection up a few lines.
home	Move selection to the first element.
end	Move selection to the last element.
M-down	Fall back to completing-read.

Filtering:

C-+	Cycle filter types. Types available are: prefix/substring/flex, prefix/substring, prefix, and regexp.
C-return	Pushes the current filter to the filter stack. The filtered list becomes the default list. The filter stack is shown in the modeline.
M-return	Pops one element from the filter stack.

List presentation:

M-+	Toggle numbering of list elements.
S-down	Increase the number of visible elements.
S-up	Decrease the number of visible elements.
C-c 1	Deletes all other windows, so the list window takes the whole frame.

Misc:

M-up	Activate the window with the list, to resize it, copy text, etc. Once there, use M-down or C-g to get back to the minibuffer.

Next:

• Documentation.
• Commands to handle the popup frame: opacity, size, position.
• When selecting the listing window, allow to make a choice from there too.
• Item categories, by prefix or explicit. Allow to filter out categories.
• Tab completion, initial input.