Re: making iswitchb the default

[Jason Rumney]

Kim F. Storm wrote:
> Jason Rumney <address@hidden> writes: 
>
> > > Just FYI, ido doesn't have these problems.
> >
> > It does have similarly strange completion results, though with ido I
> > can see after some experimentation that if I type "a TAB", I get all
> > buffers that contain "a" or "A" anywhere in their name, whereas
> > iswitchb doesn't appear to read my input at all.
>
> If you enter another TAB, ido shows all buffer names.  However, with
> ido (and iswitchb), you really don't need TAB completion -- you have
> the relevant completions listed already in the minibuffer, so using
> TAB is an exception rather than the rule (especially if you know
> which buffer or file name you are looking for).

So the bug I am seeing in iswitchb seems to be that it doesn't always 
list the completions in the minibuffer, and in such cases it appears to 
randomly select a buffer when you hit return, regardless of what you type.

With ido, if I enter 1 TAB, I get a Completions buffer with the same 
contents as the minibuffer (which is useful when there are too many 
buffers to display in the minibuffer), but when I enter a second TAB, it 
acts like C-x o (other-window), placing my cursor back in the Window I
started from. This looks like a bug.

> Normally ido matches everywhere in the name.

I suspected that might be the case, and I guess that for advanced users 
once they get used to it, it might be faster. But for a new user, such 
behaviour is surprising, so I would not recommend ido to be enabled by 
default.