By default ivy/swiper/counsel (not sure which) will visit all results as I scan through a list, e.g. when going through my buffers. I thought I liked this until working on my exwm with multiple monitors and non-emacs buffers are only allowed to appear once, meaning that simply moving down my selection list caused screen to be stolen from my other monitor.

Answer

Buffer-changes are apparently an effect of using counsel-switch-buffer, which I had bound to C-x b. Switch this instead to ivy-switch-buffer and things are better. Strangely, ivy-switch-buffer is poorly documented and didn’t even show up in my document-function place.

(global-set-key (kbd "C-x b") 'ivy-switch-buffer)

Resources

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/ixxga9/customizing_or_disabling_ivy_preselects/