Re: [External] : Re: Updating *Completions* as you type

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

> I'm not asking you, or anyone, to use Icicles.
> Unfortunately, talking about its features can
> perhaps give the opposite impression.

I didn't understand it that way either, my I just wanted to point out
that my impressions is that people miss out on even trying your packages
out, because they aren't distributed on any standard archive.  The
reason they aren't distributed on GNU or NonGNU ELPA is that you
overwrite built-in definitions -- hence my question: Are you sure this
is necessary, since if not and you could change them, your packages
could be added to GNU/NonGNU ELPA and more people could profit from your
work.

> As I tried to make clear in my posts, their aim
> was to mention various Icicles features I think
> are relevant to this thread - not to advertise
> Icicles or suggest its use.
>
> The point was to encourage consideration of such
> or similar features as useful and perhaps worth
> adding to vanilla Emacs.  Nothing more.  
>
> Icicles is just a reference point here.  Its doc
> about such features might hopefully provide some
> food for thought.  _What users can do_ is the
> point, not how such features can be implemented.
>
> It's good to see others coming around to similar
> feature ideas now.  Knowledge that such features
> work _in combination_, and they have done so for
> quite a while, should be helpful, I hope.

I might be mistaken, but the reason I thought your were "advertising"
Icicles, was that you usually respond to the suggestion to add some
feature with something like "Icicles had this feature since 200X".

> ___
>
> Wrt la petite histoire -
>
> To my knowledge, the first appearance of any
> incremental completion was in icomplete-mode.
> But that wasn't a completion whose result you
> could _use_; it was only completion you could
> _see_ (and only a few completions).  You could
> use it only as a guide/preview of what you could
> then type.  (Much later, completion of input was
> finally added to icomplete-mode.)
>
> Next was IswitchB, which later became the model
> for Ido.  Completion candidates were shown only
> in the minibuffer (and again, only a few) - no
> use of *Completions* to show candidates.
>
> Icicles came after icomplete-mode and IswitchB,
> and before Ido.  It introduced incremental
> completion showing candidates in *Completions*;
> cycling among candidates (notion of "current"
> candidate); on-the-fly sorting of them; etc.

The copyright files indicate this chronology:

icomplete: 1992
icicles:   1995
iswitchb:  1996
ido:       1996