Consult (Emacs package)
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 7 of 24 Emacs packages by recommenders
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.
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.
17 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 16
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 94%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 16 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 16 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Integrates with other Emacs completion packages
“packages like consult, vertico, marginalia etc all built on Emacs' facilities improving not just the package itself but how it integrates”
Comment from 16 Jun 2026 in “Even More Batteries Included with Emacs” “what makes them great is actually the integration between them”
Comment from 28 Apr 2026 in “Ask HN: What's your favorite Emacs package?” “they each add up to a brilliant emacs experience”
Comment from 1 Nov 2025 in “Ask HN: Where to begin with "modern" Emacs?” Powerful search and navigation commands
“consult.el which is a wonderful way to grep and search through text”
Comment from 28 Oct 2026 in “Emacs Turns 50” “demonstrates powerful completion workflows that use daily in Emacs”
Comment from 6 May 2026 in “Emacs Completion Showcase with Vompeccc” “there are so many different tools in Emacs to rapidly move around”
Comment from 24 Nov 2025 in “Editing Code in Emacs” - Comment from 1 Nov 2025 in “Ask HN: Where to begin with "modern" Emacs?”
Works with vertical completion setups
“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.”
Comment from 28 Feb 2026 in “Eschewing Zshell for Emacs Shell (2014)” “man does vertico, consult, orderless and marginalia help with discovery”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “Emacs Turns 50” Builds custom document pickers and pipelines
“quite a nifty LLM driven classification pipeline for survey answers”
Comment from 22 Jun 2026 in “Good results fine tuning a local LLM like Qwen 3:0.6B to categorize questions” “I now use a custom consult document picker (with rich annotations)”
Comment from 11 Jun 2026 in “SVG-Line: Better Status Bars for Emacs – Charlie Holland's Blog” “Consult actually works. The agent doesn't pick documents blind.”
Comment from 4 Oct 2026 in “Agents don't need memory, they need documentation” - Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Emacs-libgterm: Terminal emulator for Emacs using libghostty-vt”
Other Emacs packages people recommend
The four most recommended other Emacs packages, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Evil mode for Emacs | 39 | 7 | 85% | 11 | — | Approved |
| agent-shell | 25 | 6 | 81% | 11 | — | Approved |
| TRAMP for Emacs | 25 | 10 | 71% | 8 | — | Approved |
| gptel | 20 | 1 | 95% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Consult (Emacs package)This page | 16 | 1 | 94% | 6 | — | Approved |
What people said
15 of the 18 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“man does vertico, consult, orderless and marginalia help with discovery”
“consult.el which is a wonderful way to grep and search through text”
“Consult actually works. The agent doesn't pick documents blind.”
“It still pegs the CPU frequently.”
“quite a nifty LLM driven classification pipeline for survey answers”
“packages like consult, vertico, marginalia etc all built on Emacs' facilities improving not just the package itself but how it integrates”
“I now use a custom consult document picker (with rich annotations)”
“demonstrates powerful completion workflows that use daily in Emacs”
“what makes them great is actually the integration between them”
“consult--async-pipeline does exactly this”
“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.”
“there are so many different tools in Emacs to rapidly move around”
“search and navigation commands, provides candidates for...”
“I've found them a big improvement.”
“they each add up to a brilliant emacs experience”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.