RE: [External] : Re: Stepping Back: A Wealth Of Completion systems Re: [ELPA] New package: vertico

[Drew Adams]

> > But don't you think that it is weird that completing-read returns the
> > representation and not the object itself. That is exactly what I want to
> > avoid by having the representation computed using a method.
> >
> > The best I can think of is using hash-maps to generate anonymous methods
> > but even that seems to be looking at the issue backwards.
> 
> This is my main complaint with `completing-read' -- you can pass it data
> structures like alists or hash tables, but you still only get the string
> keys back out of it. In the past I've imagined being able to pass a
> lambda to `completing-read' (as if it didn't have enough arguments) that
> would be used to extract the desired value. If we're going to build an
> ad-hoc structure specifically for completion, we could just build it
> inside the call to `completing-read', and it could do the caching and
> value extraction.

I already mentioned that you can put the _full_ candidate
-- whatever Lisp object it might be -- on the _display_
candidate, which is just a string.

Then, providing you have a `completing-read' that doesn't
strip off text properties, you have everything you need,
just in the returned string.

How to put the full candidate, which might be a list or
whatever, on just a string?

Suppose the full candidate is an alist entry:
("cand" . WHATEVER).  The display candidate is "cand".
Users match against it, and that's what `completing-read'
returns.  But you want to get the WHATEVER when "cand"
is chosen.

Just replace "cand" by a copy of that string with a text
property that has value WHATEVER:

(defun my-put-whole-cand-prop (cand)
  "Put cdr of CAND on its car, as text property `my-whole-cand'.
Returns a new propertized string corresponding to (car CAND)."
  (let ((text-cand  (copy-sequence (car cand))))
    (put-text-property 0 (length text-cand)
                       'my-whole-candidate (cdr cand)
                       text-cand)
    (setcar cand text-cand)
    text-cand))

Use (get-text-property STRING 'my-whole-cand') to get
back WHATEVER.

If you wanted the full candidate, ("cand" . WHATEVER),
instead of just WHATEVER, then you'd use that as the
property value.
___

I do the same thing with bookmarks, so you can have more
than one bookmark with the same name.  In that case, I
put the full bookmark, a list whose car is the bookmark
name, on that name as a property:

(put-text-property 0 (length bname) 'full-record bmk bname)

So the full bookmark has a car that's a string that
contains the full bookmark as a property.  And yes, that
full bookmark that's the property value has a car that's
the string that contains...