This package provides a sort of right-click contextual menu for Emacs,
accessed through the embark-act
command (which you should bind to a
convenient key), offering you relevant actions to use on a target
determined by the context:
- In the minibuffer, the target is the current top completion candidate.
- In the
*Completions*
buffer the target is the completion at point. - In a regular buffer, the target is the region if active, or else the file, symbol, URL, s-expression or defun at point.
Multiple targets can be present at the same location and you can cycle
between them by repeating the embark-act
key binding. The type of
actions offered depend on the type of the target. Here is a sample of
a few of the actions offered in the default configuration:
- For files you get offered actions like deleting, copying, renaming, visiting in another window, running a shell command on the file, etc.
- For buffers the actions include switching to or killing the buffer.
- For package names the actions include installing, removing or visiting the homepage.
- For Emacs Lisp symbols the actions include finding the definition, looking up documentation, evaluating (which for a variable immediately shows the value, but for a function lets you pass it some arguments first). There are some actions specific to variables, such as setting the value directly or though the customize system, and some actions specific to commands, such as binding it to a key.
By default when you use embark-act
if you don’t immediately select an
action, after a short delay Embark will pop up a buffer showing a list
of actions and their corresponding key bindings. If you are using
embark-act
outside the minibuffer, Embark will also highlight the
current target. These behaviors are configurable via the variable
embark-indicators
. Instead of selecting an action via its key binding,
you can select it by name with completion by typing C-h
after
embark-act
.
Everything is easily configurable: determining the current target, classifying it, and deciding which actions are offered for each type in the classification. The above introduction just mentions part of the default configuration.
Configuring which actions are offered for a type is particularly easy
and requires no programming: the variable embark-keymap-alist
associates target types with variables containing keymaps, and those
keymaps containing bindings for the actions. (To examine the available
categories and their associated keymaps, you can use C-h v
embark-keymap-alist
or customize that variable.) For example, in the
default configuration the type file
is associated with the symbol
embark-file-map
. That symbol names a keymap with single-letter key
bindings for common Emacs file commands, for instance c
is bound to
copy-file
. This means that if you are in the minibuffer after running
a command that prompts for a file, such as find-file
or rename-file
,
you can copy a file by running embark-act
and then pressing c
.
These action keymaps are very convenient but not strictly necessary
when using embark-act
: you can use any command that reads from the
minibuffer as an action and the target of the action will be inserted
at the first minibuffer prompt. After running embark-act
all of your
key bindings and even execute-extended-command
can be used to run a
command. For example, if you want to replace all occurrences of the
symbol at point, just use M-%
as the action, there is no need to bind
query-replace
in one of Embark’s keymaps. Also, those action keymaps
are normal Emacs keymaps and you should feel free to bind in them
whatever commands you find useful as actions and want to be available
through convenient bindings.
The actions in embark-general-map
are available no matter what type
of completion you are in the middle of. By default this includes
bindings to save the current candidate in the kill ring and to insert
the current candidate in the previously selected buffer (the buffer
that was current when you executed a command that opened up the
minibuffer).
Emacs’s minibuffer completion system includes metadata indicating the
category of what is being completed. For example, find-file
’s
metadata indicates a category of file
and switch-to-buffer
’s metadata
indicates a category of buffer
. Embark has the related notion of the
type of a target for actions, and by default when category metadata
is present it is taken to be the type of minibuffer completion
candidates when used as targets. Emacs commands often do not set
useful category metadata so the Marginalia package, which supplies
this missing metadata, is highly recommended for use with Embark.
Embark’s default configuration has actions for the following target types: files, buffers, symbols, packages, URLs, bookmarks, and as a somewhat special case, actions for when the region is active. You can read about the default actions and their key bindings on the GitHub project wiki.
Embark has a notion of default action for a target:
- If the target is a minibuffer completion candidate, then the default
action is whatever command opened the minibuffer in the first place.
For example if you run
kill-buffer
, then the default action will be to kill buffers. - If the target comes from a regular buffer (i.e., not a minibuffer),
then the default action is whatever is bound to
RET
in the keymap of actions for that type of target. For example, in Embark’s default configuration for a URL found at point the default action isbrowse-url
, becauseRET
is bound tobrowse-url
in theembark-url-map
keymap.
To run the default action you can press RET
after running embark-act
.
Note that if there are several different targets at a given location,
each has its own default action, so first cycle to the target you want
and then press RET
to run the corresponding default action.
There is also the embark-dwim
which runs the default action for the
first target found. It’s pretty handy in non-minibuffer buffers: with
Embark’s default configuration it will:
- Open the file at point.
- Open the URL at point in a web browser (using the
browse-url
command). - Compose a new email to the email address at point.
- In an Emacs Lisp buffer, if point is on an opening parenthesis or right after a closing one, it will evaluate the corresponding expression.
- Go to the definition of an Emacs Lisp function, variable or macro at point.
- Find the file corresponding to an Emacs Lisp library at point.
Besides acting individually on targets, Embark lets you work collectively on a set of target candidates. For example, while you are in the minibuffer the candidates are simply the possible completions of your input. Embark provides two main commands to work on candidate sets:
- The
embark-collect-snapshot
command produces a buffer listing all the current candidates, for you to peruse and run actions on at your leisure. The candidates can be viewed in a grid or as a list showing additional annotations. - The
embark-export
command tries to open a buffer in an appropriate major mode for the set of candidates. If the candidates are files export produces a Dired buffer; if they are buffers, you get an Ibuffer buffer; and if they are packages you get a buffer in package menu mode.If you use the grepping commands from the Consult package,
consult-grep
,consult-git-grep
orconsult-ripgrep
, then you’ll probably want to install and load theembark-consult
package, which adds support for exporting a list of grep results to an honest grep-mode buffer, on which you can even use wgrep if you wish.
When in doubt choosing among these a good rule of thumb is to always
prefer embark-export
since when an exporter to a special major mode is
available for a given type of target, it will be more featureful than
an Embark collect buffer, and if no such exporter is configured the
embark-export
command falls back to the generic
embark-collect-snapshot
.
These commands are always available as “actions” (although they do not
act on just the current target but on all candidates) for embark-act
and are bound to S
, E
, respectively, in embark-general-map
. This means
that you do not have to bind your own key bindings for these (although
you can, of course!), just a key binding for embark-act
.
There is also the embark-collect-live
variant of
embark-collect-snapshot
which produces “live” Embark Collect buffers,
meaning they auto-update as the set of candidates changes. Most users
of visual completion UIs such as Vertico, Icomplete, Selectrum or Ivy
will probably either not want to use this, to avoid seeing double (the
list of candidates is displayed both by Embark and by the completion
UI), or to configure their completion UI to hide while using
embark-collect-live
. See the Embark wiki for sample configuration for
Selectrum.
Embark also has the embark-become
command which is useful for when
you run a command, start typing at the minibuffer and realize you
meant a different command. The most common case for me is that I run
switch-to-buffer
, start typing a buffer name and realize I haven’t
opened the file I had in mind yet! I’ll use this situation as a
running example to illustrate embark-become
. When this happens I can,
of course, press C-g
and then run find-file
and open the file, but
this requires retyping the portion of the file name you already
typed. This process can be streamlined with embark-become
: while still
in the switch-to-buffer
you can run embark-become
and effectively
make the switch-to-buffer
command become find-file
for this run.
You can bind embark-become
to a key in minibuffer-local-map
, but it is
also available as an action under the letter B
(uppercase), so you
don’t need a binding if you already have one for embark-act
. So,
assuming I have embark-act
bound to, say, C-.
, once I realize I
haven’t open the file I can type C-. B C-x C-f
to have
switch-to-buffer
become find-file
without losing what I have already
typed in the minibuffer.
But for even more convenience, embark-become
offers shorter key
bindings for commands you are likely to want the current command to
become. When you use embark-become
it looks for the current command in
all keymaps named in the list embark-become-keymaps
and then activates
all keymaps that contain it. For example, the default value of
embark-become-keymaps
contains a keymap embark-become-file+buffer-map
with bindings for several commands related to files and buffers, in
particular, it binds switch-to-buffer
to b
and find-file
to f
. So when
I accidentally try to switch to a buffer for a file I haven’t opened
yet, embark-become
finds that the command I ran, switch-to-buffer
, is
in the keymap embark-become-file+buffer-map
, so it activates that
keymap (and any others that also contain a binding for
switch-to-buffer
). The end result is that I can type C-. B f
to
switch to find-file
.
The easiest way to install Embark is from GNU ELPA, just run M-x
package-install RET embark RET
. (It is also available on MELPA.) It is
highly recommended to also install Marginalia (also available on GNU
ELPA), so that Embark can offer you preconfigured actions in more
contexts. For use-package
users, the following is a very reasonable
starting configuration:
(use-package marginalia
:ensure t
:config
(marginalia-mode))
(use-package embark
:ensure t
:bind
(("C-." . embark-act) ;; pick some comfortable binding
("C-;" . embark-dwim) ;; good alternative: M-.
("C-h B" . embark-bindings)) ;; alternative for `describe-bindings'
:init
;; Optionally replace the key help with a completing-read interface
(setq prefix-help-command #'embark-prefix-help-command)
:config
;; Hide the mode line of the Embark live/completions buffers
(add-to-list 'display-buffer-alist
'("\\`\\*Embark Collect \\(Live\\|Completions\\)\\*"
nil
(window-parameters (mode-line-format . none)))))
;; Consult users will also want the embark-consult package.
(use-package embark-consult
:ensure t
:after (embark consult)
:demand t ; only necessary if you have the hook below
;; if you want to have consult previews as you move around an
;; auto-updating embark collect buffer
:hook
(embark-collect-mode . consult-preview-at-point-mode))
Other Embark commands such as embark-become
, embark-collect-snapshot
,
embark-collect-live
, embark-export
can be run through embark-act
as
actions bound to B
, S
, L
, E
respectively, and thus don’t really need
a dedicated key binding, but feel free to bind them directly if you
so wish. If you do choose to bind them directly, you’ll probably want
to bind them in minibuffer-local-map
, since they are most useful in
the minibuffer (in fact, embark-become
only works in the minibuffer).
The command embark-dwim
executes the default action at point. Another good
keybinding for embark-dwim
is M-.
since embark-dwim
acts like
xref-find-definitions
on the symbol at point. C-.
can be seen as a
right-click context menu at point and M-.
acts like left-click. The
keybindings are mnemonic, both act at the point (.
).
Embark needs to know what your minibuffer completion system considers
to be the list of candidates and which one is the current one. Embark
works out of the box if you use Emacs’s default tab completion, the
built-in icomplete-mode
or fido-mode
, or the third-party packages
Vertico, Selectrum or Ivy.
If you are a Helm or Ivy user you are unlikely to want Embark since those packages include comprehensive functionality for acting on minibuffer completion candidates. (Embark does come with Ivy integration despite this.)
By default, if you run embark-act
and do not immediately select an
action, after a short delay Embark will pop up a buffer called *Embark
Actions*
containing a list of available actions with their key
bindings. You can scroll that buffer with the mouse of with the usual
commands scroll-other-window
and scroll-other-window-down
(bound by
default to C-M-v
and C-M-S-v
).
That functionality is provided by the embark-mixed-indicator
, but
Embark has other indicators that can provide information about the
target and its type, what other targets you can cycle to, and which
actions have key bindings in the action map for the current type of
target. Any number of indicators can be active at once and the user
option embark-indicators
should be set to a list of the desired
indicators.
Embark comes with the following indicators:
embark-minimal-indicator
: shows a messages in the echo area or minibuffer prompt showing the current target and the types of all targets starting with the current one; this one is on by default.embark-highlight-indicator
: highlights the target at point; also on by default.embark-verbose-indicator
: displays a table of actions and their key bindings in a buffer; this is not on by default, in favor of the mixed indicator described next.embark-mixed-indicator
: starts out by behaving as the minimal indicator but after a short delay acts as the verbose indicator; this is on by default.embark-isearch-highlight-indicator
: this only does something when the current target is the symbol at point, in which case it lazily highlights all occurrences of that symbol in the current buffer, like isearch; also on by default.
Users of the popular which-key package may prefer to use the
embark-which-key-indicator
from the Embark wiki. Just copy its
definition from the wiki into your configuration and customize the
embark-indicators
user option to exclude the mixed and verbose
indicators and to include embark-which-key-indicator
.
As an alternative to reading the list of actions in the verbose or
mixed indicators (see the previous section for a description of
these), you can use embark-keymap-help
after running embark-act
which
is bound to C-h
in all of Embark’s action keymaps. That command will
prompt you for the name of an action with completion (but feel free to
enter a command that is not among the offered candidates!), and will
also remind you of the key bindings. You can press @
at the prompt and
then one of the key bindings to enter the name of the corresponding
action.
You may think that with the *Embark Actions*
buffer popping up to
remind you of the key bindings you’d never want to use completion to
select an action by name, but personally I find that typing a small
portion of the action name to narrow down the list of candidates feels
significantly faster than visually scanning the entire list of actions.
If you find you prefer entering actions that way, you can configure
embark to always prompt you for actions by setting the variable
embark-prompter
to embark-completing-read-prompter
.
By default, if you call embark-act
from the minibuffer it quits the
minibuffer after performing the action. You can change this by setting
the user option embark-quit-after-action
to nil
. That variable
controls whether or not embark-act
quits the minibuffer when you call
it without a prefix argument, and you can select the opposite behavior
to what the variable says by calling embark-act
with C-u
. Note that
both the variable embark-quit-after-action
and C-u
have no effect when
you call embark-act
outside the minibuffer.
Having embark-act
not quit the minibuffer can be useful to turn
commands into little “thing managers”. For example, you can use
find-file
as a little file manager or describe-package
as a little
package manager: you can run those commands, perform a series of
actions, and then quit the command.
If you find yourself using the quitting and non-quitting variants of
embark-act
about equally often, you may prefer to have separate
commands for them instead of a single command that you call with C-u
half the time. You could, for example, keep the default exiting
behavior of embark-act
and define a non-quitting version as follows:
(defun embark-act-noquit ()
"Run action but don't quit the minibuffer afterwards."
(interactive)
(let ((embark-quit-after-action nil))
(embark-act)))
By default, for most commands embark
inserts the target of the action
into the next minibuffer prompt and “presses RET
” for you, accepting
the target as is.
For some commands this might be undesirable, either for safety
(because a command is “hard to undo”, like delete-file
or
kill-buffer
), or because further input is required next to the target
(like when using shell-command
: the target is the file and you still
need to enter a shell command to run on it, at the same prompt). You
can add such commands to the embark-allow-edit-actions
variable
(which by default already contains the examples mentioned, and a few
others as well).
You can customize what happens after the target is inserted at the
minibuffer prompt of an action. There are embark-setup-action-hooks
,
that are run by default after injecting the target into the
minibuffer. The hook can be specified for specific action commands by
associating the command to the desired hook. By default the hooks with
the key t are executed.
For example, consider using shell-command
as an action during file
completion. It would be useful to insert a space before the target
file name and to leave the point at the beginning, so you can
immediately type the shell command. That’s why in embark
’s default
configuration there is an entry in embark-setup-action-hooks
associating
shell-command
to embark--shell-prep
, a simple helper command that
quotes all the spaces in the file name, inserts an extra space at the
beginning of the line and leaves point to the left of it.
All internal keymaps are defined with a helper macro
embark-define-keymap
that you can use to define your own keymaps,
whether they are for new categories in embark-keymap-alist
or for any
other purpose! For example a simple version of the file action keymap
could be defined as follows:
(embark-define-keymap embark-file-map
"Example keymap with a few file actions"
("d" delete-file)
("r" rename-file)
("c" copy-file))
Remember also that these action keymaps are perfectly normal Emacs
keymaps, and do not need to be created with this helper macro. You
can use the built-in define-key
, or your favorite external package
such as bind-key
or general.el
to manage them.
It is easy to configure Embark to provide actions for new types of targets, either in the minibuffer or outside it. I present below two very detailed examples of how to do this. At several points I’ll explain more than one way to proceed, typically with the easiest option first. I include the alternative options since there will be similar situations where the easiest option is not available.
Say you use the new tab bars from Emacs 27 and you want Embark to offer tab-specific actions when you use the tab-bar-mode commands that mention tabs by name. You would need to: (1) make sure Embark knows those commands deal with tabs, (2) define a keymap for tab actions and configure Embark so it knows that’s the keymap you want.
For step (1), it would be great if the tab-bar-mode
commands reported
the completion category tab
when asking you for a tab with
completion. (All built-in Emacs commands that prompt for file names,
for example, do have metadata indicating that they want a file
.) They
do not, unfortunately, and I will describe a couple of ways to deal
with this.
Maybe the easiest thing is to configure Marginalia to enhance those
commands. All of the tab-bar-*-tab-by-name
commands have the words
“tab by name” in the minibuffer prompt, so you can use:
(add-to-list 'marginalia-prompt-categories '("tab by name" . tab))
That’s it! But in case you are ever in a situation where you don’t
already have commands that prompt for the targets you want, I’ll
describe how writing your own command with appropriate category
metadata looks:
(defun my-select-tab-by-name (tab)
(interactive
(list
(let ((tab-list (or (mapcar #'(lambda (tab) (cdr (assq 'name tab)))
(tab-bar-tabs))
(user-error "No tabs found"))))
(completing-read
"Tabs: "
(lambda (string predicate action)
(if (eq action 'metadata)
'(metadata (category . tab))
(complete-with-action action tab-list string predicate)))))))
(tab-bar-select-tab-by-name tab))
As you can see, the built-in support for setting the category
metadatum is not very easy to use or pretty to look at. To help with
this I recommend the consult--read
function from the excellent
Consult package. With that function we can rewrite the command as
follows:
(defun my-select-tab-by-name (tab)
(interactive
(list
(let ((tab-list (or (mapcar #'(lambda (tab) (cdr (assq 'name tab)))
(tab-bar-tabs))
(user-error "No tabs found"))))
(consult--read tab-list
:prompt "Tabs: "
:category 'tab))))
(tab-bar-select-tab-by-name tab))
Much nicer! No matter how you define the my-select-tab-by-name
command, the first approach with Marginalia and prompt detection has
the following advantages: you get the tab
category for all the
tab-bar-*-bar-by-name
commands at once, also, you enhance built-in
commands, instead of defining new ones.
Let’s say we want to offer select, rename and close actions for tabs (in addition to Embark general actions, such as saving the tab name to the kill-ring, which you get for free). Then this will do:
(embark-define-keymap embark-tab-actions
"Keymap for actions for tab-bar tabs (when mentioned by name)."
("s" tab-bar-select-tab-by-name)
("r" tab-bar-rename-tab-by-name)
("k" tab-bar-close-tab-by-name))
(add-to-list 'embark-keymap-alist '(tab . embark-tab-actions))
What if after using this for a while you feel closing the tab without confirmation is dangerous? You have a couple of options:
- You can keep using the
tab-bar-close-tab-by-name
command, but no longer let Embark pressRET
for you:(add-to-list 'embark-allow-edit-actions 'tab-bar-close-tab-by-name)
- You can write your own command that prompts for confirmation and
use that instead of
tab-bar-close-tab-by-name
in the above keymap:(defun my-confirm-close-tab-by-name (tab) (interactive "sTab to close: ") (when (y-or-n-p (format "Close tab '%s'? " tab)) (tab-bar-close-tab-by-name tab)))
Notice that this is a command you can also use directly from
M-x
independently of Embark. Using it fromM-x
leaves something to be desired, though, since you don’t get completion for the tab names. You can fix this if you wish as described in the previous section.
Say you want to teach Embark to treat text of the form
wikipedia:Garry_Kasparov
in any regular buffer as a link to Wikipedia,
with actions to open the Wikipedia page in eww or an external browser
or to save the URL of the page in the kill-ring. We can take advantage
of the actions that Embark has preconfigured for URLs, so all we need
to do is teach Embark that wikipedia:Garry_Kasparov
stands for the URL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Kasparov
.
You can be as fancy as you want with the recognized syntax. Here, to
keep the example simple, I’ll assume the link matches the regexp
wikipedia:[[:alnum:]_]+
. We will write a function that looks for a
match surrounding point, and returns an improper list of the form
'(url actual-url-of-the-page beg . end)
where beg
and end
are the
buffer positions where the target starts and ends, and are used by
Embark to highlight the target (if you have embark-highlight-indicator
included in the list embark-indicators
).
(defun my-short-wikipedia-link ()
"Target a link at point of the form wikipedia:Page_Name."
(save-excursion
(let* ((beg (progn (skip-chars-backward "[:alnum:]_:") (point)))
(end (progn (skip-chars-forward "[:alnum:]_:") (point)))
(str (buffer-substring-no-properties beg end)))
(save-match-data
(when (string-match "wikipedia:\\([[:alnum:]_]+\\)" str)
`(url
(format "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s" (match-string 1 str))
,beg . ,end))))))
(add-to-list 'embark-target-finders 'my-short-wikipedia-link)
Embark actions are normal Emacs commands, that is, functions with an
interactive specification. In order to execute an action, Embark
calls the command with call-interactively
, so the command reads
user input exactly as if run directly by the user. For example the
command may open a minibuffer and read a string
(read-from-minibuffer
) or open a completion interface
(completing-read
). If this happens, Embark takes the target string
and inserts it automatically into the minibuffer, simulating user
input this way. After inserting the string, Embark exits the
minibuffer, submitting the input. (The immediate minibuffer exit can
be disabled for specific actions in order to allow editing the
input: see the embark-allow-edit-actions
configuration variable).
Embark inserts the target string at the first minibuffer opened by
the action command, and if the command happens to prompt the user
for input more than once, the user still interacts with the second
and further prompts in the normal fashion. Note that if a command
does not prompt the user for input in the minibuffer, Embark still
allows you to use it as an action, but of course, never inserts the
target anywhere. (There are plenty of examples in the default
configuration of commands that do not prompt the user bound to keys
in the action maps, most of the region actions, for instance.)
This is how Embark manages to reuse normal commands as actions. The mechanism allows you to use as Embark actions commands that were not written with Embark in mind (and indeed almost all actions that are bound by default in Embark’s action keymaps are standard Emacs commands). It also allows you to write new custom actions in such a way that they are useful even without Embark.
Staring from version 28.1, Emacs has a variable
y-or-n-p-use-read-key
, which when set to t
causes y-or-n-p
to use
read-key
instead of read-from-minibuffer
. Setting
y-or-n-p-use-read-key
to t
is recommended for Embark users because
it keeps Embark from attempting to insert the target at a y-or-n-p
prompt, which would almost never be sensible. Also consider this as
a warning to structure your own action commands so that if they use
y-or-n-p
, they do so only after the prompting for the target.
Here is a simple example illustrating the various ways of reading
input from the user mentioned above. Bind the following commands to
the embark-symbol-map
to be used as actions, then put the point on
some symbol and run them with embark-act
:
(defun example-action-command1 ()
(interactive)
(message "The input was `%s'." (read-from-minibuffer "Input: ")))
(defun example-action-command2 (arg input1 input2)
(interactive "P\nsInput 1: \nsInput 2: ")
(message "The first input %swas `%s', and the second was `%s'."
(if arg "truly " "")
input1
input2))
(defun example-action-command3 ()
(interactive)
(message "Your selection was `%s'."
(completing-read "Select: " '("E" "M" "B" "A" "R" "K"))))
(defun example-action-command4 ()
(interactive)
(message "I don't prompt you for input and thus ignore the target!"))
(define-key embark-symbol-map "X1" #'example-action-command1)
(define-key embark-symbol-map "X2" #'example-action-command2)
(define-key embark-symbol-map "X3" #'example-action-command3)
(define-key embark-symbol-map "X4" #'example-action-command4)
Also note that if you are using the key bindings to call actions,
you can pass prefix arguments to actions in the normal way. For
example, you can use C-u X2
with the above demonstration actions to
make the message printed by example-action-command2
more emphatic.
This ability to pass prefix arguments to actions is useful for some
actions in the default configuration, such as
embark-shell-command-on-buffer
.
Alternatively, Embark does support one other type of action: a non-interactive function of a single argument. The target is passed as argument to the function. For example:
(defun example-action-function (target)
(message "The target was `%s'." target))
(define-key embark-symbol-map "X4" #'example-action-function)
Note that normally binding non-interactive functions in a keymap is useless, since when attempting to run them using the key binding you get an error message similar to “Wrong type argument: commandp, example-action-function”. In general it is more flexible to write any new Embark actions as commands, that is, as interactive functions, because that way you can also run them directly, without Embark. But there are a couple of reasons to use non-interactive functions as actions:
- You may already have the function lying around, and it is convenient to simply reuse it.
- For command actions the targets can only be simple string, with no text properties. For certain advanced uses you may want the action to receive a string with some text properties, or even a non-string target.
Embark cooperates well with the Marginalia and Consult packages. Neither of those packages is a dependency of Embark, but Marginalia is highly recommended, for reasons explained in the rest of this section.
Embark comes with actions for symbols (commands, functions, variables
with actions such as finding the definition, looking up the
documentation, evaluating, etc.) in the embark-symbol-map
keymap, and
for packages (actions like install, delete, browse url, etc.) in the
embark-package-keymap
.
Unfortunately Embark does not automatically offers you these keymaps
when relevant, because many built-in Emacs commands don’t report
accurate category metadata. For example, a command like
describe-package
, which reads a package name from the minibuffer,
does not have metadata indicating this fact.
In an earlier Embark version, there were functions to supply this
missing metadata, but they have been moved to Marginalia, which
augments many Emacs command to report accurate category metadata.
Simply activating marginalia-mode
allows Embark to offer you the
package and symbol actions when appropriate again. Candidate
annotations in the Embark collect buffer are also provided by the
Marginalia package.
- If you install Marginalia and activate
marginalia-mode
, the list view in Embark Collect buffers will use the Marginalia annotations automatically. - If you don’t install Marginalia, you will see only the annotations
that come with Emacs (such as key bindings in
M-x
, or the unicode characters inC-x 8 RET
). - If you have Consult installed and call
embark-collect-snapshot
fromconsult-line
,consult-mark
orconsult-outline
, you will notice the Embark Collect buffer starts in list view by default. Similarly, you’ll notice that theconsult-yank
family of commands start out in list view with zebra stripes, so you can easily tell where multi-line kill-ring entries start and end. - The function
embark-open-externally
has been removed following the policy of avoiding overlap with Consult. If you used that action, add the small function to your configuration or install Consult and useconsult-file-externally
.
If you want to learn more about how others have used Embark here are some links to read:
- Fifteen ways to use Embark, a blog post by Karthik Chikmagalur.
- Protesilaos Stavrou’s dotemacs, look for the section called “Extended minibuffer actions and more (embark.el and prot-embark.el)”
And some videos to watch:
- Embark and my extras by Protesilaos Stavrou.
- Embark – Key features and tweaks by Raoul Comninos on the Emacs-Elements YouTube channel.
- Livestreamed: Adding an Embark context action to send a stream message by Sacha Chua.
- System Crafters Live! - The Many Uses of Embark by David Wilson.
- Using Emacs Episode 80 - Vertico, Marginalia, Consult and Embark by Mike Zamansky.
Contributions to Embark are very welcome. There is a wish list for actions, target finders, candidate collectors and exporters. For other ideas you have for Embark, feel free to open an issue on the issue tracker. Any neat configuration tricks you find might be a good fit for the wiki.
Code contributions are very welcome too, but since Embark is now on GNU ELPA, copyright assignment to the FSF is required before you can contribute code.
While I, Omar Antolín Camarena, have written most of the Embark code and remain very stubborn about some of the design decisions, Embark has recieved substantial help from a number of other people which this document has neglected to mention for far too long. In particular, Daniel Mendler has been absolutely invaluable, implementing several important features, and providing a lot of useful advice.
Code contributions:
- Daniel Mendler
- Clemens Radermacher
- José Antonio Ortega Ruiz
- Itai Y. Efrat
- a13
- jakanakaevangeli
- mihakam
- Brian Leung
- Karthik Chikmagalur
- Roshan Shariff
- condy0919
- Damien Cassou
- JimDBh
Advice and useful discussions: