Re: Info-mode and ido

[William Xu]

"Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

>> I especially love ido's "reduce matchings while typing" feature.
>
> Icicles does the same thing: it incrementally updates the completion matches
> (candidates) while you type. It can use ordinary prefix matching, regexp
> matching, fuzzy matching, or scatter matching (same as ido's "flex" matching).
> In all cases, the set of candidates is updated incrementally, while you edit
> your input. This always happens (unless you toggle it off).

Ah, i realize it, it's nice.  All the magic happens when the
*Completions* buffer is opened.  

> But you don't see the candidates in the minibuffer, as you do in ido. Icicles 
> is
> designed to work well even with very large candidate sets - the minibuffer is
> too small for that. 

Ido also works well with large candidates, for example, opening some
file under /usr/share: `C-x C-f /usr/share'.  I usually don't
look-first-then-type, instead, just keep typing until I get what I
want(since I know what I'm going to open), so the minibuffer isn't an
issue for me.  

> Candidates are available in *Completions*, if you want to
> see them. By default, *Completions* is shown only on demand (hit TAB or 
> S-TAB),
> but you can optionally have it appear as soon as Emacs starts reading your
> input.

So this is the major UI difference between Icicles and Ido.  One of the
drawbacks of open a separate *Completions* buffer is kind of
distraction, with window creation and destruction.

> You might like Icicles or you might not, but don't expect it to be the same as
> either vanilla Emacs or ido.

I think I'm hopelessly addicted to ido at present.  

-- 
William

http://williamxu.net9.org