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

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2021 20:05:51 +0700
> Cc: Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>, "T.V Raman" <raman@google.com>,
>  Manuel Uberti <manuel.uberti@inventati.org>,
>  Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> On Wed, 7 Apr 2021 at 19:11, Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> wrote:
> 
> > Given that Emacs is primarily keyboard-driven, it seems to me that the
> > most efficient way to select an item is, and will always be, to use a
> > textual representation of the items in the list to select them.  C-x 8 RET
> > does this, you (can) select an unicode character with its name.  For
> > example C-x 8 RET inf RET inserts the infinity symbol.  Or course you
> > could also navigate through the ~45000 unicode characters to select the
> > one you want, but that would be far less efficient.
> 
> This is a narrow-minded view.

Please try to be kinder when you post here.  Telling someone he is
narrow-minded is not exactly friendly.

> For one, it does not address the use case, “I know the character I
> want exists, I vaguely know which script or block it belongs to, and
> I will recognize it when I see it, but at the moment I don’t
> remember its name or any of its aliases”.
> 
> The UI for this case is implemented in, e.g., gucharmap(1). It
> consists of a sidebar with a list of filters (mostly scripts or
> blocks, choosable from the View menu, but also “All”), a grid of
> characters showing the filtered subset, a panel displaying information
> on the currently selected character, and a search facility (on Ctrl+F
> and Ctrl+G and Ctrl+Shift+G). For convenience, filters can be switched
> sequentially by pressing Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down without
> moving keyboard focus away from the grid.

This isn't completion, this is (one type of) selection dialog.  Emacs
supports some of them, although not for selecting a character, when
the user invokes a command by some mouse gesture.  (We could add an
option to pop up these dialogs even if the command was invoked by
keyboard, if people like the idea.)  For example, we have a dialog for
selecting a file and a dialog for selecting a font.

If someone wants to add a dialog for selecting a character using its
block and other attributes, such a feature will be very welcome, of
course.