Recommended packages

I use and recommend this combination of packages:

• consult: This package
• vertico: Fast and minimal vertical completion system
• marginalia: Annotations for the completion candidates
• embark and embark-consult: Action commands, which can act on the completion candidates
• orderless: Completion style which offers flexible candidate filtering
• wgrep (or ‘grep-edit-mode’ on Emacs 31): Editing of grep buffers. Use with ‘consult-grep’ via ‘embark-export’.

There exist multiple fine completion UIs beside Vertico, which are supported by Consult. Give them a try and find out which interaction model fits best for you.

• The builtin completion UI, which pops up the ‘*Completions*’ buffer.
• The builtin ‘icomplete-vertical-mode’.
• Mct by Protesilaos: Minibuffer and Completions in Tandem, which builds on the default completion UI.

Note that all packages are independent and can be exchanged with alternative components, since there exist no hard dependencies. Furthermore it is possible to get started with only default completion and Consult and add more components later to the mix. For example you can omit Marginalia if you don’t need annotations. I highly recommend the Embark package, but in order to familiarize yourself with the other components, you can first start without it - or you could use with Embark right away and add the other components later on.

We document a list of auxiliary packages in the Consult wiki. These packages integrate Consult with special programs or with other packages in the wider Emacs ecosystem.