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

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 10.04.2021 18:02, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > I don't think we disagree too much, it's just there are cases where
> > "completion" (as defined by you) is really inconvenient: you both don't
> > know what you want to type, and the options are hard to type as well.
> >
> > But there are also cases (IME) when you don't necessarily know what to
> > type, but you want to continue typing. That is the scenario of an
> > average (or, perhaps, a beginner) Java developer typing in a IDE: when
> > you don't remember the method name, you try to guess by typing a
> > relevant word, see what names match, and often enough get it right.
>
> I agree that similar features are used for both purposes.  But they
> are still different purposes, and the discussion will become
> inefficient (and for me lose its purpose) if we try to ignore that
> difference or blur it.

I was saying that there are different ways to decide which UI a 
situation calls for, and most of the popular UIs are hybrid anyway.

So there's a lot of grey area.

But there are situations that really call for "selection" like 
interface, and Emacs doesn't have any comparably good ones in the 
default config, that universal code could really rely on.

> > > With that in mind, completion for symbols in invoking M-. and
> > > completion for file names in invoking some file-related command have
> > > the same traits, at least for me.
> >
> > I don't always know what file name I want to type either, and either
> > guess by typing a part of the word and pressing TAB. Or type multiple
> > relevant words at once, if the completion UI allows it (that's very
> > helpful for choosing a project-relative file name in project-find-file).
>
> Never happens to me, and probably never will.  If I don't know what to
> type, I first find out (by "other means").

Let me expand on one of the previous examples. There is this command, 
project-find-file, which expects you to choose among a number 
(thousands?) of long-ish file names relative to the project root.

Do you also always precisely know the file name you want to visit in 
advance? And so never really make use of the discoverability side-effect 
of the completion buffer?

> > But Company is just as useful in "needs help in typing as few characters
> > as possible" kind of scenarios.
>
> But its goal is still different, and doesn't make much sense in my
> completion use cases.  In fact, whenever I need to use programs that
> only provide the "selection" type, I frequently am annoyed and many
> times need to repeatedly type the same input until I get it right.

I would hope that "Emacs with company-mode enabled" is not among such 
programs.