Never clear what Helm is

[DamienCassou]

Hi,

I've just arrived here and don't understand what Helm is. I had a look at the README and even the documentation pdf. Still, I don't get the point. Does it replace ido? Does it provide a completion mechanism?

What about describing some scenarios where Helm would be useful?
What about providing some screencasts?

Just suggestions

[bbatsov]

The documentation is a work in progress :-) Install Helm, run helm-mini and you'll understand what it's all about - effective means of navigating to files, buffers, symbols, whatever there is a helm source definition for. If there is a source definition for it, you can use Helm to navigate it. Helm provides the infrastructure, the helm sources provide the data.

[leodumont]

And in what way Helm is different from Anything ? I Ask that, because I read Helm is the successor of Anyhting here : http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Anything

[bbatsov]

It has a modular and cleaner codebase. For more details - http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.anything/469

[yyr]

I am not a helm user (yet). after reading here and there, My impressions are you can select/complete things from more than one source. It comes with a framework by which you can easily define a new source of different kind. where as in Ido you only get fuzzy matching from a dumb list. In helm the list may not be just a list of strings, they can be list of actions (I guess).

I may well be wrong.

[thierryvolpiatto]

Please continue this conversation on emacs-helm mailing list, thanks.