# Consult (Emacs package)

16 Hacker News commenters recommended Consult (Emacs package) and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Emacs package of search, navigation and completion commands that people praise for working well with other tools like Vertico and Marginalia. One critic reports it still uses the CPU heavily.

## Why people recommend it

- Integrates with other Emacs completion packages (3 comments): "packages like consult, vertico, marginalia etc all built on Emacs' facilities improving not just the package itself but how it integrates" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550771)) "what makes them great is actually the integration between them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931829)) "they each add up to a brilliant emacs experience" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45783786))
- Powerful search and navigation commands (4 comments): "consult.el which is a wonderful way to grep and search through text" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276040)) "demonstrates powerful completion workflows that use daily in Emacs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037157)) "there are so many different tools in Emacs to rapidly move around" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038051))
- Works with vertical completion setups (2 comments): "I prefer this to a normal shell's C-r, because with my vertical completion setup I can see multiple matches for my search simultaneously." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47191279)) "man does vertico, consult, orderless and marginalia help with discovery" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50285296))
- Builds custom document pickers and pipelines (4 comments): "quite a nifty LLM driven classification pipeline for survey answers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48627324)) "I now use a custom consult document picker (with rich annotations)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48494093)) "Consult actually works. The agent doesn't pick documents blind." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49953780))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Evil mode for Emacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/evil-mode.md): 39 recommend
- [TRAMP for Emacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tramp.md): 25 recommend
- [SLIME](https://hackerapproved.com/p/slime.md): 19 recommend
- [Vertico](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vertico.md): 18 recommend
- [Eglot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/eglot.md): 16 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Consult (Emacs package)", https://hackerapproved.com/p/consult/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).