Re: [ANNOUNCE] mailaprop: modern popup-style autofill for email addresses

[Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
>Looks very nice...  but the main difference between this and ecomplete
>seems to be that ecomplete puts the completions in the echo area and
>mailaprop uses a tooltip?

Hmm, I can't tell.  As of commit 9f22b7d2, ecomplete.el has no function doc strings nor any usage-informing variable doc strings, and the format of ~/.ecompleterc is not documented.  From looking at the elisp file, I wasn't immediately sure what ecomplete does :-).  I grepped around and found this in doc/misc/message.texi:

  If you're using @code{ecomplete}, all addresses from @code{To} and
  @code{Cc} headers will automatically be put into the
  @file{~/.ecompleterc} file.  When you enter text in the @code{To} and
  @code{Cc} headers, @code{ecomplete} will check out the values stored
  there and ``electrically'' say what completions are possible.  To
  choose one of these completions, use the @kbd{M-n} command to move
  down to the list.  Use @kbd{M-n} and @kbd{M-p} to move down and up the
  list, and @kbd{RET} to choose a completion.

It seems like ecomplete does something at least similar to what mailaprop does.  The main questions I have are:

1) Is there a way to load in existing email history?  If I knew the format of the .ecompletrc file, maybe I could make mailaprop.py generate it.  Personally, with a million email messages' worth of legacy data, it seems a pity to start collecting addresses from scratch now :-).

2) Does it prioritize the completion list according to some scoring algorithm, so that the most likely candidates are keystrokewise closest?  The "(loop for (key count time text) ...)" in `ecomplete-get-matches' gave me hope, but further reading led me to think maybe it's not doing that after all.  I'm not sure, though.

Best regards,
-Karl