Emacs — handling helm

After jumping to the spacemacs camp, I felt the major hurdle was getting used to the helm layer that comes by default with spacemacs.

In particular, I have always been accustomed to C-x C-w to write a buffer to a new file, but under helm auto-completion, it seemed that there was no option to write to a new filename.

Worse, when I started typing a new filename it would auto-complete to some existing file and I ended up overwriting an existing file, assuming that I was writing to a new file.

Googling helm and this particular problem, it seems that there a couple of ways to revert this behavior, the most straightforward is disabling the auto-complete feature for helm.

C-Backscape

This allows you to escape from auto-complete in helm and create new file without having to create a file in a terminal and overwriting with C-x C-w.