RE: Info-mode and ido

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

> > A difference is that Ido shows candidates in the minibuffer 
> > and Icicles does not, but that is not a major UI difference.
> > (And you can use Icicles with icomplete[+].el.)
> 
> Thanks for pointing out.  (I guess mastering Icicles must be tough...)

Tough why? Because it does not give you "ido-style" out of the box?

You don't need to master Icicles to use it, but if you want non-default behavior
then yes, you need to find out what's available. It's like Emacs: you can get
behavior you are used to in another editor, but you might need to read some doc
to find out how.

> That works more like ido, only very slow.  I did some tests with
> icy-mode and icomplete-mode on.  It(switching buffers, selecting nodes
> in Info-mode) usually takes around 0.5~1 second for the completions to
> appear in minibuffer, on a 2.2GHz, Intel Core 2 Due macbook. 

I don't want to belabor this, but I'll mention it for others:

1. icomplete[+].el is different from Icicles. I mentioned it only because you
like to see candidate feedback in the minibuffer - even if you don't look at it.
;-)

2. By default, Icicles updates the set of completions at each character you
edit. You can turn this incremental completion off as an option or toggle it
off/on using `C-#' in the minibuffer. There are also other options to control
this behavior: a delay and a threshold (number of candidates).

3. Icicles also checks where, in your input, matching fails, and it highlights
that non-matching part (hit `C-M-l' to delete it). (This is similar to the
isearch match-failure highlighting that we added to Emacs recently.) That can
mean multiple checks of parts of your input against the domain of candidates (it
uses binary search to minimize the number of checks).

`C-#' also turns this off/on. There are additional options to control this
behavior: a delay, a threshold, and when to perform it - never, only on demand
(when you hit [S-]TAB), not for lax completion (e.g. file names), not for remote
file names, and so on.

Someone like yourself, who tends not to look at what he types and is concerned
about speed, might want to turn off non-match highlighting for specific contexts
or always.

4. You can complete without displaying *Completions*. That display, which you
find distracting, also takes some time.

5. What seems to be faster is sometimes slower. ;-)

HTH.