Re: Emacs completion matches selection UI

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Mon, 23 Dec 2013 08:42:51 -0500 Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote: 

>> OK, is there a way to make a verification and testing plan for this?  If
>> there was some automation around completion support, it would certainly
>> speed things up, but we need at least a list of currently non-compliant
>> modes in Emacs.  How do you look for the exceptions, by searching for
>> old functions or testing manually?

SM> The code which does not use minibuffer.el for its completion generally
SM> rolls its own.  Grepping for *Completions* and display-completion-list is
SM> what I've done so far, but I probably missed some.

SM> I don't think it's terribly important to make sure we got 100% of the cases.

OK, I'll move on.  If the new UI proves compelling, users will tell us
they want it supported in their favorite modes :)

>> As with company-mode, this can be a frontend choice (affecting
>> `display-completion-list', and see below for the suggested
>> `display-list' function).  How about a defcustom
>> `completion-ui-frontend' with some choices?

SM> The general idea of completion-ui was great, yes.

>> For the user, a new defcustom `completion-ui-preferences'?  And for the
>> caller, some kind of plist/alist passed to `completion-at-point' that
>> merges cleanly with `completion-ui-preferences'?

SM> Could be.  Tho as mentioned before, I'm not sure that there's a need for
SM> caller-provided preferences.

OK, I'll work on this off-list to keep the noise down, I've generated
enough emacs-devel traffic so far!

Dmitry, Stephen, please let me know directly if you want to participate
in the design of `completion-ui-*' as described here.  I honestly can't
keep track of all the completion packages available, but I'm
xposting/CC-ing the Helm developers, and Toby Cubitt (because of
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CompletionUI the prefix "completion-ui"
may need to be changed, but it seems to have similar ideas to the
frontends we're describing here).  Drew Adams (Icicles) and Kim Storm
(ido) may also be interested but I think they read emacs-devel.  For all
the autocomplete forks and add-ons, I have no idea who to CC.  Anyhow,
if you're interested, reply to me directly please.

Thanks
Ted