Abo Abo’s counsel package (part of swiper/ivy) puts together a set of replacements for Emacs commands that leverages the power of the ivy completion library.

One of my favourites is counsel-yank-pop which replaces the standard clipboard history (kill-ring in Emacs terminology) with an ivy-powered version. You can then type search strings to filter your clipboard history dynamically.

I use the following code to configure counsel-yank-pop to replace the standard yank-pop on M-y. The only thing I missed about the vanilla yank-pop was that repeatedly pressing M-y cycled through the entries. The counsel version doesn’t do this by default but this is easy to add by binding M-y to ivy-next-line in the ivy-minibuffer-map.

(use-package counsel
  :bind
  (("M-y" . counsel-yank-pop)
   :map ivy-minibuffer-map
   ("M-y" . ivy-next-line)))