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

[T.V Raman]

Water water everywhere --- not a drop to drink!

The wealth of completion systems popping up speaks to the power of emacs
as a platform for both productive editting as well as rapid
experimentation --- given the wealth of completion frameworks we now
have, perhaps we could abstract out the various high-level dimensions
along which completing systems in emacs can vary -- then put together a
higher-level framework that lets one mix and match? My concern is that
if we dont leverage the current wealth of opportunities, the various
systems will each wither on the vine in their own way; as an example,
ido which has likely been around the longest amongst the new  completion
systems is  already looking unmaintained.

So here is my attempt at identifying the dimensions of variability:

1. Where invoked -- anywhere in emacs vs minibuffer.
   2.  When invoked -- as in find-file and friends vs everywhere
      something prompts in the minibuffer.
      3. Using what? the various backends that populate the available
         choices.
         4. How displayed: How the choices are displayed -- horizontal,
            vertical, and perhaps 3-d in the future.
            5. How completed: tab, vs prefix vs  fuzzy completion vs ...

               Thoughts?

               My own thinking in this space is colored by this blog
               article I wrote a while ago:
               https://emacspeak.blogspot.com/2018/06/

               Almost all completion activity can be expressed in terms
               of a finite automaton with nodes Select, Input, Filter
               and Target.
               
               --Raman
               
Manuel Uberti <manuel.uberti@inventati.org> writes:

> On 05/04/21 12:22, Daniel Mendler wrote:
>> I want to submit the package "vertico" to ELPA. The package provides a
>> minimalistic vertical interactive completion system, comparable to Ivy,
>> Icomplete-vertical or Selectrum. Vertico adheres to the default 
>> completing-read
>> API and is fully compliant with all Emacs completion tables, including 
>> dynamic
>> completion tables.
>> 
>> The Vertico source and a README can be found at 
>> https://github.com/minad/vertico.
>
> FWIW, I have been using vertico as my default completion system since last
> Thursday and it has been a great experience so far. It works as expected 
> without
> adding extra features that I have no need for.
>
> Thanks Daniel for the awesome work.

-- 

Thanks,

--Raman
?7?4 Id: kg:/m/0285kf1  ?0?8