Re: Who uses "complete word" (aka SPC) in the minibuffer and how/why

[Bastien <bzg@altern.org>]

Magnus Henoch <mange@freemail.hu> writes:

> I use it with M-x, especially when I want to run a command that is
> shadowed by a shorter one, e.g. customize-variable (shadowed by
> customize) and mail-add-payment-async (shadowed by mail-add-payment).
> At the end of the common part I hit SPC to get completion of the longer
> command.
>
> I could do this with the sequence TAB and '-' too, but that would be one
> extra keypress.

A reasonable behavior for minibuffer-complete could be:

(0) try to complete
(1) if (0) fails, present the list of possible completions
(2) if the previous TAB was (1), complete by selecting the 
    string which will reduce the number of completions to 
    the larger subset of the list presented in (1)

In the case Magnus describes it would lead to:

M-x cust TAB    [complete => custom]
M-x custom TAB  [display the list of possible completions]
M-x custom TAB  [complete => customize]
M-x custom TAB  [display the list of possible completions]
M-x custom- TAB [display the list of remaining completions]

... 

-- 
Bastien