Showing information about available targets and actions

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.
• ‘embark-highlight-indicator’: highlights the target at point; 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’.

If you use Vertico, there is an even easier way to get a ‘which-key’-like display that also lets you use completion to narrow down the list of alternatives, described at the end of the next section.