1.1 ‘emacs-helm.sh’

If your system supports it, you should run the ‘emacs-helm.sh’ script to start an Emacs instance with minimal, Helm-specific configuration.

This is useful for debugging, and easier than starting Emacs with ‘emacs -Q’ and configuring Helm from scratch.

If Helm is installed via MELPA, the ‘emacs-helm.sh’ script should be located at ‘~/.emacs.d/elpa/helm-<version>/emacs-helm.sh’.

Of course you have to cd to your helm directory and run the script from there, an alternative is symlinking it to somewhere in your ‘PATH’ e.g. “~/bin” (See note at bottom for those that have installed from source with ‘make’).

You can use the -h argument for help:

$ helm -h
Usage: helm [-P} Emacs path [-h} help [--] EMACS ARGS

If your emacs binary is not in a standard place i.e. “emacs”, you can specify the path with “-P”.

Note: If you have installed Helm from Git and used ‘make && sudo make install’ you can run directly ‘helm’ at command line from any place i.e. no need to cd to helm directory.

1.2 ‘emacs -Q’

If you cannot run the ‘emacs-helm.sh’ script, be sure to reproduce the problem with ‘emacs -Q’, then installing Helm as described in the Install section.

2.1 Version info

When reporting bugs, it is important to include the Helm version number, which can be found in the helm-pkg.el file.