Is there Sublime Text - style command palette in Emacs?

Question

There is such feature as Command Palette in Sublime text:

It provides searchable list of command with human-readable descriptions.

Is there anything similar to this in Emacs?

Answer 1

I use helm-M-x. It's part of the package helm. You can view a command's description with helm-execute-persistent-action.

Answer 2

Icicles provides what you describe.

And not only for M-x but for anything that prompts for a command name.

And it provides the same thing for not just names of commands but everything else: faces, buffers, files, variables, functions, bookmarks -- you name it. It even provides completion of key sequences and menus/menu items.

And you can get additional information (complete doc string) about any completion candidates, on demand. And even without asking for complete doc on a candidate, you get a summary description of it in the mode line.

And you can progressively narrow the set of candidates by using multiple patterns to match

Answer 3

You can also try counsel-M-x which comes with counsel package and uses ivy(similar to helm) as a backend.

If you are on emacs 25, there is the command describe-symbol which can provide help for any face/variable/function and ivy provides narrowing for that as well.