Helm Selector

Helm Selector is a collection of Helm helper functions for convenient buffer selection.

It is especially helpful to create Helm sessions to navigate buffers of a given mode in a “do what I mean” fashion:

• If current buffer is not of mode X, switch to last buffer of mode X, or create one if none exists.
• If current buffer is of mode X, show a Helm session of all buffers in mode X.

In the Helm session, it’s also possible to input an arbitrary name which will be used for the creation of a new buffer of mode X.

Helm Selector comes with a bunch of predefined selectors which should be autoloaded. Here follows an example setup to bind the Info and the shell selector:

(require 'helm-selector)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-h i") 'helm-selector-info)
(global-set-key (kbd "s-RET") 'helm-selector-shell)
(global-set-key (kbd "s-S-RET") 'helm-selector-shell-other-window)

Calling helm-selector-shell with a prefix argument is equivalent to helm-selector-shell-other-window.

Creating a new selector is simple, it all happens in the helm-selector helper:

(defun helm-selector-info ()
  "Helm for `info' buffers."
  (interactive)
  (helm-selector
   "Info"
   :predicate (helm-selector-major-modes-predicate 'Info-mode)
   :make-buffer-fn (lambda (&optional name)
                     (info nil (when name (format "*info*<%s>" name))))
   :use-follow-p t))

(defun helm-selector-info-other-window ()
  "Like `helm-selector-info' but raise buffer in other window."
  (interactive)
  (let ((current-prefix-arg t))
    (call-interactively #'helm-selector-info)))

References

helm-switch-shell is a similar project with a narrower scope. It should be superseded by this package; if not, please report the missing features.