Re: Is intellisense features integration in Emacs technically possible?

[Jorgen Schaefer]

On Sun, 26 Jan 2014 01:53:09 +0200
Dmitry Gutov <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.
> 
> [...]
> 
> But what's a "most likely completion"? When there's just one suggested
> completion, then yes, we show an inline overlay. Otherwise, the full
> list.

The "first" one. ;-) Basically, what you get when you hit RET in
Company, without typing anything. The delay for this can be a lot
shorter, up to "almost instantaneous", than the delay for popping up the
completion pop-up.

(Come to think of it, isn't there a way of sorting completion
results? It's one of the things I want to get auto-complete to do,
because completions from Python backends are most of the time of higher
quality than, say, dabbrev completions.)

> > Oh, and support for getting completion candidates asynchronously.
> > This is quite tricky, as the user might have moved point in the
> > time the candidates were returned, and it's not always necessary to
> > re-request the candidates then. auto-complete.el handles this
> > "mostly ok" using an init function and caching the response, but
> > has some hard to trace problems.
> 
> I remember you creating a Company issue, me writing you an example
> snippet, and you going away seemingly (?) satisfied.
> 
> Have you had any progress using it? As long as we don't have
> asynchronous users, there's really not much material for me to work
> with to improve the API, as well as not much motivation.

I did not look much closer. The solution you provided is more or less
what auto-complete does with its init call and caching, which would
likely work slightly better than auto-complete because I have more
control over it, but well, a-c already has it implemented. Hence, I was
quite satisfied - it solves my problem, and I can not and do not expect
any more from you, you were very helpful already - but it's not what I
was hoping for.

Originally, I created the issue because I was hoping Company would be
able to fully replace auto-complete just requiring fewer hacks and
work on my part. Sadly, while working with it, I realized Company as is
does not really replace auto-complete for me. It's close, but not quite
there yet.

I want to look at Company again at some point in the future and see if
I can make a list of things I miss and maybe start working on them, but
at the moment I'm very low on time, so I pushed that down my list quite
a bit I'm afraid.


As I said in my original post, that was not intended as a request to
get all of this implemented or even as a complaint, just as a note on
what the technical hurdles for Emacs implementing IntelliSense features
actually are: Very few. The features are mostly there, and what is
missing is mainly a common API and some polishing here and there.

Regards,
Jorgen