Re: iswitchb

["paul r" <paul.r.ml@gmail.com>]

2008/3/19, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>:
> After trying iswitchb for several days

Thanks for that.

>  It is not very helpful for me because I know what buffer I want to go
>  to and I start typing the beginning of it without looking at anything.
>  The only way iswitchb could help me is if I were to look at its
>  display to try to find a shorter string that would work.  But that
>  would slow me down.

In some cases, I think it can help, especially for buffers you did not
open yourself but were opened automatically by emacs or by some mode.

>  iswitchb was a pain in the neck when I wanted to go to buffer inout
>  and it kept taking me to 4inout and 5inout instead.  I did not at first
>  even see what was happening.  When I did see, I still didn't know
>  a way to prevent it.  I suppose there is some iswitchb feature I
>  could use, but rather than learn it, I turned off iswitchb.

I warned about this eventuality when you asked how does iswitchb
behave, last week.
IIRC, in this thread, some people agreed that :
  - what is really helpful in iswitchb in the possibility to enter any
substring of the buffer name to find it, but this could be implemented
into current default switch-to-buffer.
  - occasionaly, real-time display of matching buffer can help, but if
you think it clutters, that could be disabled by default. Or at least
it could be let to the user to disable it as an option.
  - C-s and C-r to cycle through matches are not intuitive enought,
some better idea about how to disambiguate buffer names should be
proposed.