From: Le Wang <l26wang@gmail.com>
To: "Óscar Fuentes" <ofv@wanadoo.es>
Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Emacs needs truely useful flex matching
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 07:34:07 +0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAM=K+iotF2wn_83NYhuQgW1cn4HrQCY8M1-LeBfXKtq6yaYwYA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <877gl0od6x.fsf@wanadoo.es>
On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 1:49 AM, Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> wrote:
> Le Wang <l26wang@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Since there is a big thread about a standard way to recognise project roots, I
>> want to bring up another area in which Emacs is falling behind other
>> Editors (Sublime Text, Textmate, and Vim).
>> Choosing from a very large list of files (or any strings for that matter) with
>> a minimum of keystrokes.
>>
>> ido-mode has `ido-enable-flex-matching', but that does not do the smart
>> sorting required.
>>
>> Vim has this through the Command-T plugin. The best way to "get it" is by
>> watching it in action:
>> https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.wincent.com/command-t/screencasts/command-t-demo.mov
>>
>> Skip to 6 minutes to see it in action in a large project with
>> repetitive path segments.
>>
>> Homepage here: https://wincent.com/products/command-t
>>
>> The matching engine is implemented in C and it interfaces with Vim through the
>> Ruby bridge. I think in order to sort a large list of strings (> 10k), this
>> will also have to be implemented in C to be fast enough if done for Emacs.
>>
>> The sorting algorithm is roughly this for a query: "abcd"
>>
>> 1. Get all matches for "a.*b.*c.*c"
>> 2. Calculate score of each match
>> - contiguous matched chars gets a boost
>> - matches at word and camelCase boundaries (abbreviation) get a boost
>> - matches with smallest starting index gets a boost
>> 2. Sort list according to score.
>>
>> A lot of my colleagues use this kind of flex matching to navigate around our
>> large code base in Sublime Text and I'm very jealous that with so few
>> keystrokes the most useful
>> matches just float to the top.
>>
>> This navigation could be implemented with Helm if Emacs had a builtin
>> fast smart flex sorting engine.
>
> IIUC the vim plugin you mention depends on a pre-built list of files. In
> that regard, how is it better than GNU Global, which allows to search
> files with a regex (and much more)? Maybe the algorithm you describe
> can be implemented on GNU Global and then use an Emacs interface.
The type of smart matching + sorting would be useful for files, M-x,
C-h v, all kinds of completion where large lists are involved. GNU
globals maybe should support it, but Emacs shouldn't depend on
external dependency to offer something this useful.
> I agree that it would be nice to have such a feature native on Emacs,
> though. IIRC someone mentioned a few days ago that a regex of the type
> you descibe has very high execution complexity (-> is slow)
That is true, and speed is of the utmost essence, so emacs-lisp is
probably too slow.
> but obviously it is working for that vim extension.
Textmate has had this for a while, and I see Sublime Text do it very
well every day, of course. :(
These editors are moving the ball for what people expect a modern
editor to provide.
Honestly when I first tried `ido-enable-flex-matchine', I thought it
was strange, So it's entirely possible I haven't made the strongest
case for the usefulness of this feature. Please let me know if you
aren't convinced..
--
Le
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2013-03-21 23:34 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2013-03-21 15:02 Emacs needs truely useful flex matching Le Wang
2013-03-21 17:49 ` Óscar Fuentes
2013-03-21 23:34 ` Le Wang [this message]
2013-03-21 23:58 ` Stefan Monnier
2013-03-22 1:00 ` Le Wang
2013-03-22 8:24 ` Eli Zaretskii
2013-03-22 11:18 ` Dmitry Gutov
2013-04-14 16:48 ` Le Wang
2013-04-14 18:18 ` Stefan Monnier
2013-04-15 0:14 ` Le Wang
2013-04-15 13:50 ` Stefan Monnier
2013-03-22 2:36 ` Richard Stallman
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