helm vs ido

[Thorsten Jolitz]

Hi List, 

I used ido-everywhere and smex for quite a while now as a happy
user. Recently I discovered helm as an impressive replacement for
autocomplete. However, helm is so powerful it might replace ido, smex,
regexp-builder and other useful libraries. 

There are some aspects I really like about helm, but others not so much,
e.g.:

- how to get rid of helm-completion in the mini-buffer? In Ido, there is
  C-f, but helm seems to follow more a bondage&submission approach with
  no way out (or I'm just a new user and did not discover the
  trick). C-x C-w (write-file) is a good example were completion gets in
  your way. 

- is ido-completion smarter than helm-completion? Somehow I have the
  (obviously subjective) feeling that I reach the searched
  buffer/file/command ... with less effort using Ido. One example might
  be M-x w3m - with Ido its typing M-x w3 RET, with helm the basic w3m
  command is not necessary the first choice and some navigation in the
  completion buffer or some more typing is necessary. 

Right now I'm back to ido-everywhere, but on the other hand I miss
helm-grep, helm-regexp and other amazing stuff this package offers. Do I
simply have to study helm more deeply to make it replace all its
predecessors without regrets, or are there actually use cases where ido
et.al. are still better than helm?

-- 
cheers,
Thorsten