Sidekick is a Emacs package that provides information about a symbol inside a single window.

It looks like all it does at this point is search for a symbol name. According to the author they "hope to extend it in the near future to support things such as getting a symbols documentation and extracting other time saving information," but that functionality is not there yet.

That's correct, it's very basic at this point.

I think it's quite neat! I personally don't agree with the sentiment: "all this does is x in one thing". Yeah but that's the point. Sometimes you don't wanna run 3 commands sequentially but see their results in one window.

Neat little package! Will be using it. Thanks for sharing!!

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I think people would find it useful to provide specific examples of how to achieve something similar with built-in functionality.

> There is little to be gained from polluting the Emacs ecosystem with packages that are badly conceived and do not generalize well. There's little to be gained by polluting this thread with fundamentally negative comments when someone has tried to make a positive and useful contribution. I could understand defending a codebase that exists with such a shutdown but to gatekeep putting a package out there that *you* don't need or have to use? It just comes off as pointed and unwelcoming.

Not everything needs to be positive. It's an honest criticism.

There's a difference between providing the built-in alternatives and asking what the difference is, and going off on some ego-stroking tangent that this person has. Surely you can see the difference? If you can't, fair game, I've no interest in convincing you after that.

Looks very interesting. I wanted to create something like this myself. Thank you.

In general, I see much more unsubstantiated positivity. Do comments which essentially boil down to "Wow! Neato!" bother you as much as honest criticism? > ego-stroking tangent Not at all how I read what they wrote. They're actually calling for humility on the author's part. "Why should I use this instead of X,Y, or Z?" is a natural question that package authors should anticipate and address. I understand the author of this package is excited (they shared a vague gif of this package with no additional commentary a few days ago), but I agree with /u/perihelion777 that they should have a little more restraint before announcing packages.

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Frank's 10th law - Any sufficiently complicated IDE contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Smalltalk.

People generally don't have the time to explore and delve into all the facilities of Emacs before using it. It is better to point them to the existing alternatives to Sidekick rather than ask go hunting for themselves. I've been using Emacs for about 5 years now and I don't think I've begun to scratch its surface to learn and use all its features. I need something like Sidekick, but not knowing of any existing alternatives I'd rather use it than go hunting for an alternative now that it has been announced.

/u/VernonGrant I wouldn't rush publishing to MELPA or any other package repo, until the code, feature set and design is more crystallized. It's a big responsibility to maintain any software package and to /u/perihelion777's point, having abandon-ware in package repos has a negative effect on package discovery. https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/mct was discontinued recently, though it was just released a few months ago. https://github.com/radian-software/selectrum is getting superceded by https://github.com/minad/vertico within just a year or two. it took me months to understand the ido/fido/icomplete/helm/ivy/consul/consult/prescient/orderless/selectrum/vertico/marginalia/embark ecosystem. i wish it had been simpler to get oriented. At this early stage of your code, you probably want to elicit feedback from more experienced users, who will have no problem cloning your repo and running an eval-buffer on it. That being said, it's good to release early and often. I found it interesting to see a package in such an embryonal stage.

Thanks for the feedback. I don't understand why so many people assume I'm unaware of certain Emacs features, it's kinda weird. 😅

well, based on your code, you are very much aware of a looot of things in Emacs, but yeah, it's a good question where the worry comes from... i guess, it's mostly gut-feeling. but it's a good idea contrast your package with the various other packages, which were brought up, no? https://github.com/minad/vertico#alternatives is a good template to follow, IMHO. i also like to read "rationales", what you can find for many Clojure libs. eg: https://clojure.org/about/spec or an Elisp example: https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el#guiding-principles

> This is a bad idea as it tries to do multiple tasks but none of those tasks will be done well (as is usually the nature of such endeavors). Can you give an example? I think my view is so far from yours i'm having a hard time understanding you. Maybe you can give an example where this isn't extensible but the built-in alternative is? The notion of don't program things which do more than one task at a time seems almost like it's against automation. I believe it's more likely i'm misunderstanding though.

I see, thanks for these examples! I will definitely add something like this to the readme in the future.