RE: inputting characters by hexadigit

[Drew Adams]

> The problem is that you don't know that something at the end 
> begins with ZETA until you go to the end of the list.  When you know
> what's in the list, isearch, partial-completion-mode, icicles, etc.
> work great.  I don't think they should be disabled in favor of
> categorization, only that when there's too much information for a
> screenful it should be condensed (maybe something like folding-mode
> can be used to hide the things in a category?)

A bit OT:

Speaking only for Icicles, what you type in the minibuffer automatically
(incrementally) filters the candidates (by default, at least), so I don't see
the problem you mention.

It sounds like you want to be able to also filter on category, that is, filter
on the pair: category + name-in-category. For that, in Icicles, you can use a
multi-completion that includes the category.

What you described was actually, IIUC, to *first* filter on category, *then*
filter on name-in-category. That too is possible in Icicles, but filtering on
either or both, as I mentioned above, is better - quicker and more general.

In Icicles, you can also filter progressively, using multiple patterns, so you
can easily filter first with category, then with name-in-category, if you like,
using separate patterns. But you need not do things in that order, and you need
not even treat the two separately at all.