RE: OK, so I've thrown Ido out and turned on Icicles. What now?

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> One thing that is a bit strange is that suddenly, all Dired buffers
> are rainbow-colored.  AFAIR, I did not change anything else (apart
> from having recently installed Emms, but I don't suspect this is to
> blame). Is it possible that Icicles has something to do with this?

Sounds like you have Dired+ in your `load-path'.  If it is thus
available then Icicles will load it, since Icicles can take
advantage of Dired+ features.

If you don't like the Dired+ highlighting, here are two solutions:

1. Move `dired+.el' out of your `load-path', to a different
   directory.  Or delete it entirely, if you never use it.

2. Customize Dired+.  You can easily change (e.g. lower) the
   highlighting (font-lock) level.  And you can customize the
   faces etc.

> Another is that Icicles seem to be substantially slower than Ido.
> (Not that it bothers me a lot.)

As I mentioned, there are things you can change, to change this.
By default, Icicles does a lot of things, providing additional
info as feedback, incrementally updating things, including input
mismatches, etc.  You can turn all of this off, and you can
generally turn it on/off on the fly.  See the doc.  Start with
`C-#' (and `C-M-#', if you use `icomplete-mode').  See option
`icicle-highlight-input-completion-failure'.  See 
http://www.emacswiki.org/Icicles_-_Large_Candidate_Sets.  Etc.