James Cherti

The consult Emacs package provides asynchronous search commands such as consult-fd , consult-find , consult-grep , consult-git-grep , and consult-ripgrep . For these commands, Consult does not necessarily start a new search for every change to the minibuffer input. Instead, it uses configurable debounce and throttle delays to control when asynchronous processes start, while a separate refresh delay controls how frequently asynchronous results are pushed to the completion UI.

The first time I tried Consult, I thought to myself: this feels slow compared to Counsel (I had a similar feeling about Emacs settings such as show-paren-delay ). With Counsel, results updated immediately on every keystroke, while Consult seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second before updating the list.

As it turns out, this behavior is entirely intentional. The current Consult defaults are conservative by design.

These values reduce the amount of time Consult waits before starting another asynchronous search and allow the completion UI to refresh much more frequently.