From: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>
To: Spencer Baugh <sbaugh@janestreet.com>
Cc: 65137@debbugs.gnu.org, Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA>
Subject: bug#65137: 29.1; completion-substring-try-completion doesn't return the longest common substring
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2023 02:25:41 +0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <263f9281-67f4-2eea-ef9b-8dfa67740854@gutov.dev> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <ierv8cx7sym.fsf@janestreet.com>
On 29/08/2023 18:45, Spencer Baugh wrote:
>> Could you describe the usage scenario a little more?
>>
>> From my brief testing, the current behavior seems okay most of the
>> time: you still get the short input which matches a bunch of strings
>> (e.g. filenames), you can type a little more chars and narrow down.
>>
>> With your change, TAB will insert the most common prefix for all those
>> completions, which in case of project-file can be a pretty long
>> string. Not a huge problem, but on the face of it that doesn't seem
>> like an improvement. So which scenario would that make better?
>
> As a very concrete example that I ran into frequently, for
> project-find-file if you have two files:
>
> dir/foo.ml
> dir/foo.mli
>
> and you input "foo" and press Tab, you get "foo.ml". But it is then
> impossible to expand that to dir/foo.ml using completion because of this
> bug. So you have to manually select dir/foo.ml if you want to visit
> that file, either by switching to *Completions* and selecting it or by
> using minibuffer-next-completion.
Now I understand, thank you. I guess this is something that certain
environments (such as OCaml) are more prone to than others.
Also this problem seems somewhat unique to the default completion
mechanism. If I use Ivy, or Helm, or Vertico, or even the "bare"
icomplete-mode, they all have the notion of the currently selected
completion, with a short key sequence to choose it.
E.g. with icomplete-mode on I would type until the needed completion is
highlighted in the minibuffer and then press C-j (maybe press C-, or C-.
to select it).
The default completion, as you say, has the means to do a similar thing
with M-<up> and M-<down>, but it's less obvious and requires more
keypresses.
> After this bugfix, inputting "foo" and pressing Tab will expand to
> "dir/foo.ml".
>
> In general, this bug makes it impossible to input a file name with
> completion (in project-file) if that file name is a prefix of another
> file name. Like dir/foo and dir/foo.tar, or dir/foo.log and
> dir/foo.log.bak.
Your patch fixes that by expanding inputs into longer lines after TAB
(meaning, the user will see their input text shift, sometimes
considerably, to the right, and perhaps feel a little disoriented). It
might be a minor thing, but a downside nevertheless.
I do wonder what Stefan thinks what would be the right behavior here.
prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-08-29 23:25 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-08-07 23:24 bug#65137: 29.1; completion-substring-try-completion doesn't return the longest common substring Spencer Baugh
2023-08-07 23:50 ` Spencer Baugh
2023-08-08 0:41 ` Spencer Baugh
2023-08-08 11:04 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-08-08 12:40 ` sbaugh
2023-08-30 1:31 ` Stefan Monnier via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors
2023-09-05 19:51 ` Spencer Baugh
2023-09-05 21:26 ` Stefan Monnier via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors
2023-09-06 11:00 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-08-25 0:40 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-08-25 2:30 ` Drew Adams
2023-08-29 15:45 ` Spencer Baugh
2023-08-29 23:25 ` Dmitry Gutov [this message]
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