Re: Abbrev suggestions - feedback appreciated

[Mathias Dahl]

Hi Mathias,

Hi, and thanks for your comments!

This will be a pretty cool feature. 

I thought so too :)

 

I see just one caveat. I don't use abbrev for "auto-correct", but I know that many folks do[1].

Neither do I, mostly (I have a few "corrections" as well, but mostly I used it to type long or "hard" words using fewer characters.)

So people could have abbrev entries like "eamcs" that "expand" to "emacs". So with this feature, the user will be suggested to type "eamcs" each time they correctly type "emacs"?

Yes, or the last defined abbrev for "emacs" anyway (if there are more than one).

 

If so, can the suggestion be enabled only when the abbreviation is shorter than the expansion by N number of characters, where that N can be set using a defcustom? (I would default that to 2 or 3). 

It would be possible to have an option like that, or similar. The option could keep the diff in number of characters or the diff in percentage, or whatever clever thing we want. I will try to implement it.

Also, someone mailed me about the scenario where there are more than one abbrev for the same expansion. Right now, you will get a suggestion to use the most recently defined abbrev. I wonder how useful it would be to see the full list of abbrevs that might expand to a certain expansion... For me, the primary idea is to remind me that I have at least one abbrev defined for a certain expansion. If there are more than one, the reminder is enough, at least for me. I would probably have a look (M-x edit-abbrevs RET) to see what I have defined.

Does anyone else here think it would be useful to list all abbrevs that expand to a certain expansion? Surely it would be doable, but it would also be slower.

/Mathias