Suggestion for enhancing keybinding discoverability based on Emacs embark-prefix-help

[MartinDrees]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to suggest an addition to which-key style keybinding popups for Helix: using a completion-based keybinding discovery system, inspired by embark-prefix-help in Emacs.

Instead of passively showing all possible keys after a prefix (like which-key), embark-prefix-help triggers a searchable, completion-based prompt. When you press a prefix (e.g. C-x, could be something like SPC in Helix normal mode) and then C-h, you get a live, fuzzy-searchable list of all available keybindings under that prefix. You can instantly filter and execute commands while viewing brief documentations and keybindings.

This approach:

• Scales much better than keybinding popups.
• Makes discovery fast and searchable.

Here’s a related Emacs Reddit thread where this setup is discussed.

For Helix, one could do this in addition to which-key popups, or maybe even have curated popups with the most important keybindings in categories and the option to trigger a completion-based interface.

I think this would fit well with Helix’s minimal, keyboard-driven UX and scale nicely as keymaps grow.

What do you think?