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

[Tassilo Horn]

Daniel Mendler <mail@daniel-mendler.de> writes:

>> I use the default completion system, so for me it is not about
>> filtering a data set but expanding a string. Just to reiterate, this
>> is exactly the point I am bringing this up.
>
> Well, but what does this mean in the context of opening a file? I
> guess, you are not interested in the string (the file name) alone but
> in the end you want to select a file?

I'm not sure that's what your are asking but one thing that comes to
mind is that when I want to find the file

  ~/Repos/el/emacs/lisp/doc-view.el

I can just do

  C-x C-f reeld<TAB>

and that will already expand to ~/Repos/el/emacs/l/d if
`completion-styles' contains `initials' (and
`read-file-name-completion-ignore-case' set to t).  Now depending on
what I type further, it'll also switch between lisp/ or lib/ directory.

AFAIK, that's not really supported with (most) alternative completion
UIs where the possible completions are always the files of the currently
selected directory.  Of course, you can work around that by having a
"completion source" returning all files below a directory recursively
(fzf style) but that tends to be slow if there are many.

Bye,
Tassilo