Re: Is intellisense features integration in Emacs technically possible?

[Jorgen Schaefer]

On Thu, 23 Jan 2014 17:13:47 -0500
Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:

> > Important features I haven't seen for c-a-p-f yet: Provide an
> > overlay of the most likely completion candidate while you type for
> > quick completion with TAB; add annotations to completion
> > candidates, for example to indicate symbol type; ability to provide
> > documentation for a completion candidate so that can be shown while
> > browsing candidates.
> 
> c-a-p-f AFAIK refers to "completion-at-point-functions", which is
> where the *backends* live.  AFAIK none of what you cite would be
> affected by or need changes in completion-at-point-functions.
> Instead those issues affect the completion UI used on top of
> completion-at-point-functions, which could be completion-at-point,
> company, icomplete, or anything else.

I think there is currently no provision for the backend to return
annotation information or documentation that complements the actual
completions? That I meant is that the completion table returned by a
member in `completion-at-point-functions' would need some way of
returning not only the possible completions at point, but also
additional information in some standard way so that the frontends can
display them in addition to the completions.

> But returning completion candidates asynchronously is not compatible
> with the current all-completions/try-completion API, so we'd need
> a fairly serious rework of minibuffer.el.

Do you think reworking minibuffer.el to support both types of calls
with a unified interface (for example with the possibility to block
until the asynchronous call returns if we need the completions "right
now") would be the right thing? Alternatively, a separate in-buffer
completion behavior akin to or based on auto-complete.el might make
more sense?

Jorgen