RE: `completion-in-region'

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

> > BTW, some modern text editors (such as textmate) have 
> > started offering fuzzy completion as default.

It is a bad default, IMO. Icicles offers it, and you can make it the default if
you want (or switch to it with a key press), but I do not impose it as the
default. (I don't even recommend using it, in general.)

> Interesting.  Do you have any details of what is meant by "fuzzy"?

TextMate's default matching (it has no name AFAIK) is the same as Ido's "flex"
matching and Icicles's "scatter" matching. It is a poor-man's fuzzy matching
(not fuzzy matching in the more usual sense). (TextMate uses this matching only
for file names, I believe.)

How it works: Input characters are matched in order against completion
candidates, but possibly with intervening characters. That is, to match, each
input character must also be in the candidate, and the character order must be
respected.

I call it "scatter" or "spread" matching because your input chars are spread
throughout the candidate being matched, keeping their order.

This page describes scatter matching and other kinds of ~fuzzy matching in the
context of completion:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles_-_Fuzzy_Completion