if you don't get a helm buffer popping up, it could mean you have not
turned helm-mode on (e.g. M-x helm-mode).  That redefines completing-read
in a helm style, and should act and feel like helm when you insert a ref
link. If you don't have that on, then you will see the older completing
read behavior where you have to press tab to see the candidates etc.

The old v2 definition of org-ref-helm-insert-cite-link can be found at
https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref/blob/org-ref-2/org-ref-helm-bibtex.el#L406,
but for refs, it probably just calls this function:
https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref/blob/org-ref-2/org-ref-helm.el#L62.

in v3, you can customize the insert functions any way you want, so if you
want to use the old v2 functions and have them around, there should be no
issue with that. I think if you set `org-ref-insert-ref-function` to the
function you want, it should just work the way you want.

John

-----------------------------------
Professor John Kitchin (he/him/his)
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803
@johnkitchin
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu



On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 2:46 AM Uwe Brauer <oub@mat.ucm.es> wrote:

> >>> "JK" == John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
>
> > Probably M-x org-ref-insert-ref-link will do what you want. A lot of
> things
> > got "simplified" in version 3 to leverage completing-read more natively.
> > helm-mode should work with org-ref-insert-ref-link.
>
> I see. I think I got it to work, but the navigation is not entirely
> clear to me, if I fire up that function a buffer pops up with possible
> labels but how do I do something like scroll-up and scroll-down?
>
> > See https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref#configuration for some details
> on
> > how to configure v3 with helm.
>
> Honestly I miss a bit the old behaviour, when calling a ref function.[1]
>
> So I checked out the org-ref-2 branch from the github repository.
>
> But still there the function org-ref-helm-insert-cite-link is gone and
> other related org-ref-helm functions. Is this correct?
>
>
> Footnotes:
> [1]  I mean the helm menu that popped up
>
>