Marginalia

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’, 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 in ‘C-x 8 RET’).