Helm documentation/questions regarding non-filtered info.

I have recently been playing around a bit with helm for my personal use and, though helm per se is absolutely great, i have found the lack of documentation to be extremely annoying. Now I get it, its open source etc. and just read the source code, but I have been unable to figure out quite a few things from the source. So, my first question: Can anybody point me towards some good helm documentation that is not the wiki([https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/wiki](https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/wiki)), which is extremely lacking if you want to write your own sources instead of just using helm and that is not outdated (like this [https://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2015/01/24/Anatomy-of-a-helm-source/](https://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2015/01/24/Anatomy-of-a-helm-source/)). Then two more questions: 1. How can you do multiple columns in a helm source? For example, helm-mini shows file size,name, absolute path etc., all in different columns. 2. How can you show something, but not make it searchable. Say I have a special source for various user-defined commands, and I want to provide not only the name, but also a short description of it, or its keybindings etc, without including them in the filtering, like helm-M-x does. ​ EDIT:Here the answer by the current helm maintainer (I think) -> [https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/discussions/2493](https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/discussions/2493) (Summary: Use :match-part to only match against parts of the options). Thanks a lot for the extremely fast answer. Also, there **really** needs to be a better helm documentation. It is such a great tool, but anything other than the most basic extensions requires you to dive into the source code/ask the maintainer, which is less than ideal, I think.

I would also be very interested in this. If you do figure it out independently of this thread, would you mind shooting me a PM?

For columns, I suspect it’s non-helm specific (create a string and fill/clip with space using width constraint). I’ve used `truncate-string-to-width`. Here’s a sample https://xenodium.com/emacs-fuzzy-search-apples-online-docs (uses ivy, but should also work for helm). For the matching, it’s been a long time since I looked at helm but :match in helm-build-sync-source may enable to build your own matching logic. As for docs, I’d go straight to helm’s doc strings and see what they say. For example M-x describe-function helm-build-sync-source.

The trouble with the helm doc strings is that they are in places written in very bad English and hard to understand.

So, for your first advice: Thanks. I will look at that For the one concerning the docs: In theory, yeah. Problem is that this is what I get: *helm-build-sync-source is a Lisp macro in ‘helm-source.el’.(helm-build-sync-source NAME &rest ARGS) Build a synchronous helm source with name NAME. ARGS are keywords provided by ‘helm-source-sync’.* This is not very helpful, unfortunately. I then looked into the source code, where I see that it uses helm-make-source under the hood, which then tells me that it builds a *helm* which I need some time to understand means building a source using the helm function, which, when looked up, tells me regarding other keywords than the absolute basic ones that *Other keywords are interpreted as local variables of this Helmsession. The ‘helm-’ prefix can be omitted.* and proceeds to give one example without even listing any other possible keywords. Now if I want to use the match keyword: Well, its not listed in the docs for the helm function. What input does it take? One candidate? A list of candidates? Should it return bool or something else? I dont know, and I have no idea where I could find it. I have for the last days been spending more time fighting with helm than actually writing the stuff I was trying to write, so if somebody could point out a) A place where I can find the info I need without crawling through thousands of lines of code or b) an alternative to helm with decent docs and support for what I asked I would be really grateful. I should probably add that though this has become a bit of a rant I really appreciate the work these people are doing in their spare time and that I think that helm is a great piece of software. Its just that I am really frustrated rn because I can clearly see how useful it could be if I just could figure out how to use it properly.

Sure. But I dont have very high hopes as of rn

You're right, had a quick look and there wasn't much in there... `helm-source-sync` in helm-source.el is helpful to find args. Viewing via `M-x describe-symbol helm-source` is possibly nicer to browse. Also this post may be handy to put things together [https://www.mattduck.com/emacs-fuzzy-launcher.html](https://www.mattduck.com/emacs-fuzzy-launcher.html) I’ve written the odd helm utility years ago but these days I use ivy. Usually posted at https://xenodium.com. ps. there's also M-x helm-documentation edit: Added more things.

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I'm not very well-versed in helm, but pieced this together. Mostly by looking at `candidates` and `match-on-real` docs from `M-x describe-symbol helm-source` and `M-x describe-symbol helm-source-sync`. # helm version Looks like this [https://imgur.com/a/aHd8DAl](https://imgur.com/a/aHd8DAl) (helm :sources (helm-build-sync-source "Pick one of these" :candidates (list ;; Display string (cons "one something not searchable 1 another column" ;; Matched string "one") (cons "two something not searchable 2 another column" "two") (cons "three something not searchable 3 another column" "three")) :match-on-real t ;; Tells helm to search using real part :action (lambda (item) (message "%s" item))) :truncate-lines t) I moved from helm to ivy some time ago (personal preference). # ivy version (ivy-read "Pick one of these: " (list (propertize "one something not searchable 1 another column" 'searchable "one") (propertize "two something not searchable 2 another column" 'searchable "two")) :matcher (lambda (regex candidates) (seq-filter (lambda (item) (string-match-p ivy-text (get-text-property 0 'searchable item))) candidates))) One thing to note, if you don't need fancy display/filter features, `completing-read` can get ya very far and it works with any completion framework you have installed (ie. helm or ivy). Good luck! edit: typos