Company quickhelp

What is?

One of the things I missed the most when moving from auto-complete to company was the documentation popups that would appear when idling on a completion candidate. This package remedies that situation.

auto-complete uses popup-el to do its thing and this results in quite a few glitches. This package uses the much better pos-tip to display the popups. I recommend installing pos-tip using MELPA which fetches the version of pos-tip which is located here. This version contains a few bugfixes not included in the original on EmacsWiki.

What isn't

Since this library relies on pos-tip, and I prefer libraries that do one thing well, company-quickhelp will never be extended with optional terminal support.

Installation

I highly recommend installing company-quickhelp through package.el.

It's available on MELPA:

M-x package-install company-quickhelp

Usage

To activate company-quickhelp add the following to your init.el:

(company-quickhelp-mode)

You can adjust the time it takes for the documentation to pop up by changing company-quickhelp-delay.

If you don't want the help popup to appear automatically, but prefer it to the popup help buffer provided by company, you can set company-quickhelp-delay to nil and manually trigger the popup with M-h.

Customizing

If you hit M-x customize-group <RET> company-quickhelp <RET> you'll find a few variables you can diddle. For instance, you can change the help popup text background and foreground colors.

You might also want to put this in your init.el:

(eval-after-load 'company
  '(define-key company-active-map (kbd "C-c h") #'company-quickhelp-manual-begin))

This gives you a key to manually trigger the help popup, but only when company is doing its thing.

Developer corner

By default, company-quickhelp displays the contents of the buffer returned by a doc-buffer backend call. To override this default, backends should respond to the quickhelp-string command with a string to display instead of the contents of doc-buffer.

Is it any good?