Re: Current mode command discovery

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
> Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2021 00:32:09 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Imagine user confusion and frustration when a command that is known to
> > Help cannot be invoked!
> 
> Why would the user wish to invoke a command that makes no sense on the
> context he is working on?

Because whoever marked it "nonsensical" made a mistake?  Or because
time passed, things have changed, and what made no sense back then may
make sense now, and Emacs maintainers missed that or couldn't keep up?

IOW, let's not assume that the marking is perfect.  It's done by us,
and we can make mistakes.

> > My suggestion to change the sorting order instead of actually
> > filtering out candidates would at least avoid that danger.
> 
> The danger you are talking about is saving the user from having to
> search among thousands of irrelevant commands and/or firing himself on
> the foot.

If you are talking about display of completion candidates, we could
make display of those "irrelevant" command optional, with some
suitable gesture (like another TAB, perhaps?).  But please don't
forget that completion is also invoked when you type RET to exit the
minibuffer and run the command, and it's at that point that hard
removal of some commands could be harmful.

> After all, we also hide the menus of modes when they are not active
> on the current buffer.

Menus only show a small fraction of the commands.  More importantly, a
command that doesn't appear in the menus still can be invoked, so the
user does have a "fire escape" in that case.