This package is an attempt at radically reinterpreting the
operation of helm, the coolest Emacs framework for incremental
completion and narrowing selections. It allows a user to continue
accessing candidates from the last helm session that are still
cached in the helm-buffer created by that session.
Example: Pressing M-g n after a successful helm-grep or
helm-occur session should take the user to the next candidate
with no other interaction.
One can think of a typical helm interaction as centering around a
special buffer called the helm-buffer, which contains the current
set of possible candidates. A typical helm session is modal in
nature — the user’s focus is trapped within the helm buffer while
they execute commands to modify the set of candidates or perform
persistent actions in them.
There are two ways for a user to exit a helm session:
- Either quit the session and return to the
helm-source-buffer - Or choose a candidate and perform an action on it that exits the
helmsession.
But the helm-buffer created for that session is still present,
and can be used to start a new helm session using the command
helm-resume. This package is an attempt to use that buffer to
interact with the listed candidates without starting a new
session. Hence the name helm-modeless — the user’s focus
remains in their own buffer, and is not captured by a helm session.
As a simple example, the plain grep and occur commands are
modeless. When the user selects an occurence, the *grep* or
*occur* stays out of the way until it is recalled by
compilation-minor-mode commands next-error (M-g n) or
previous-error (M-g n). helm-modeless enables the same
behaviour for helm, by interacting with the last helm-buffer
without actually starting a helm session.