Re: [Nano-devel] RFC: who would like to have word completion?

[Benno Schulenberg]

[Re-CC-ing the list, with permission.]

On Sun, Dec 4, 2016, at 16:41, Mike Scalora wrote:
> I use IDEs with word completion regularly. This is interesting for me but
> having to hit a key to invoke is not how any other of the systems work.

Vim and emacs work the same way: they require a keystroke to
suggest possible completions -- in vim it's ^N, in emacs M-/.
(See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-devel/2016-10/msg00027.html.)

> I'm
> not sure if that makes it too cumbersome or still useful. I don't use nano
> for that much coding, usually tweaking, editing configs, etc mostly. For
> me, always showing in document order is less appealing than closest or
> closest above would probably be more useful (variable names, etc).

The closest match might be a little nicer.  Vim and emacs seem to
work that way, vim connecting tail to head of file, emacs not.
But... for word completion to be useful at all, there should be
less than a handful of matches, and you can quickly cycle through.
just a few, the order doesn't matter much then.

> Was there any investigation into an always show in gray to the right of the
> cursor mode? With a key to accept?

No.  It would eat far too many resources: search for possible
completions after /every/ keystroke, bother the user with these
matches when most of the time he/she doesn't want any of them.
No, that is not a good thing for a small editor like nano.

> Is there a repo branch I can build and try? I guess I can try pulling the
> patch out of an email but a branch is a bit easier to deal with.

Yes:  'git checkout word-completion'.

Benno

-- 
http://www.fastmail.com - Choose from over 50 domains or use your own