Anyone how to get helm (or ivy) to use a popup frame

Hello Emacs community. I'm still new to emacs to bare with my butchering of terminology ​ So, I was wondering how I can get, what I call, popup-windows for helm ​ Here is a screenshot of what I am referring to as a popup window (popup window for M-x) [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hlissner/emacs-doom-themes/screenshots/doom-one.png](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hlissner/emacs-doom-themes/screenshots/doom-one.png)

For ivy it's [ivy-posframe.](https://github.com/tumashu/ivy-posframe) For helm it's [helm-posframe](https://github.com/tumashu/helm-posframe)

helm-posframe states that it is unmaintained though. I think I'd rather stick with a regular helm session then.

There a description of how to do this somewhere in helm's wiki page. Don't remember where.

If anyone knows where this I'd appreciate it if you can share it ahaha if not, i might just switch to ivy

Huh, I'll go look for it. Didn't know that was there. To be fair though, as much as I love helm (my entire workflow centers around it), the documentation is consistently terrible.

Yeah, I've been thinking about trying ivy simply because its functions seem to be much better documented. You *can* do basically anything you want in helm, but figuring out *how* is sometimes a nightmare.

I think all of emacs documentation / guides are kind of scarce lol I wish there was a definitive guide!

I would say "we should write a definitive guide", but, you know ... [relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/927).

>relevant xkcd bahahaha this is really really true.. But! I mean at least a "Things you should know about emacs" - and a basic guide to configuring emacs so that it's usable and be very specific about all the different opinions lol ​ I am still new to emacs and can barely write any lisp functions to save my life lol. I wish there was a guide to making my emacs more usable/performant for newbies

Have you checked this: https://emacsdocs.org/? I think I saw that on this subreddit and it's really good. Right now it's just for main Emacs, org mode, Magit and a few other packages but would be amazing to see this grow. Best doc site I found for Emacs yet. Site note, to your original Question, thanks for posting as that looks interesting. I've never seen ivy like that before and would be nice to get that working (vs another buffer window)

What are you talking about? There is a super detailed manual, there are the info pages and if you want something more beginner friendly then there is the "mastering emacs" book. Emacs is one of the best documented software projects I know of.

you should look into the vertico/corfu/marginalia/consult/embark/orderless "ecosystem", because it's better integrated with built-in Emacs facilities, so it's leaner, more configurable and ultimately it's less of a buy-on, then the slightly more monolithic helm or ivy. basically you can expect a more consistent experience across your whole setup, if you use these. if you encounter any issues, you can easily narrow your issue down, by turning off some of these packages. this way you can report your issue against just one of these packages (hopefully). since they are smaller code-bases individually, it's more likely that your issue can be reproduced by others and get fixed fast. at least that's my impression of the state of affairs in completion-land :) EDIT: forgot to add some links: start here: https://github.com/minad/vertico vertico's readme links to the other projects. and here is an extremely nice demonstration of the capabilities of these packages: https://youtu.be/hPwDbx--Waw EDIT 2: these are less mature projects than helm or ivy, so you might expect more issues, but in my experience there are a lot less issues with them. I also found the source-code and the docs easier to understand.

Same developer also developed, vertico-postframe, https://github.com/tumashu/vertico-posframe

Okay cool but the very fact that I'm saying this means it's not accessible to beginners. I had no idea there was an entire book for beginners...

For Helm you can use just use (helm-display-function 'helm-display-buffer-in-own-frame) Which opens a "popup window" at the cursor upon M-x/find-file etc... I also have seen Selectrum/Vertico, Orderless Corfu etc... mentioned in this thread and I've used [emacs-mini-frame](https://github.com/muffinmad/emacs-mini-frame) to great sucess with those and according to the docs this also works with ivy so you could look into that too

Hit C-h m while in helm and search "frame".

Maybe I'll have a look into those the next time a rainy afternoon rolls around. Thanks for the tip!

As specified in helm documentation posframe is NOT needed to display helm in frames, thus it is not recommended as child frame are not the right tool for this.

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Did you really have trouble finding documentaton about emacs? Because the internet is full of it. And someone asking specific questions like you shouldn't have trouble finding it.

Amazing ! Thank you soo much for sharing you're a life saver !