System Crafters

System Crafters Live! - May 21, 2021

Watch the recording on YouTube!

Replacing Ivy and Counsel with Vertico and Consult

If you tried out Vertico after the video on Monday, you probably wondered how you can get back to the level of functionality you had with Ivy.

Today we're going to survey the set of commands that come with the Consult package to figure out which will be useful for the transition away from Ivy.

I'll be making a video on this soon, but today we'll be figuring it out together!

Mapping Ivy/Swiper/Counsel to Consult

  • swiper -> consult-line
  • counsel-rg -> consult-ripgrep
  • counsel-switch-buffer -> consult-buffer. Annotations are better for switch-to-buffer?
  • counsel-org-goto -> consult-imenu or consult-org-heading

TIP: You should set consult-project-root-function to something like this if you use Projectile: 


(defun dw/get-project-root ()
  (when (fboundp 'projectile-project-root)
    (projectile-project-root)))

Other useful commands

  • consult-mark: Show a list of previous mark locations
  • consult-outline: Show a list of headings in the current file depending on type
  • consult-minor-mode-menu: Show a list of all minor modes, press i SPC to narrow to active modes
  • consult-history: History for current minibuffer, also works for terminal modes
  • consult-file-externally: Open a file in an external program
  • consult-preview-mode: Preview selections for various commands
  • consult-completion-in-region: Can be used with the completion-in-region-function variable to do in-buffer completions using Vertico

Going up a directory in find-file

One bit of functionality I got used to in Ivy was how the counsel-find-file command would go up a directory whenever I pressed Backspace. Here's how to replicate it in Vertico! 


(defun dw/minibuffer-backward-kill (arg)
  "When minibuffer is completing a file name delete up to parent
folder, otherwise delete a character backward"
  (interactive "p")
  (if minibuffer-completing-file-name
      ;; Borrowed from https://github.com/raxod502/selectrum/issues/498#issuecomment-803283608
      (if (string-match-p "/." (minibuffer-contents))
          (zap-up-to-char (- arg) ?/)
        (delete-minibuffer-contents))
      (delete-backward-char arg)))

;; This is not a full config, just an example of the :bind!
(use-package vertico
  :bind (:map minibuffer-local-map
         ("<backspace>" . dw/minibuffer-backward-kill)))

Other Consult packages

Other resources

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