Re: [PATCH] (icomplete-vertical-mode): Add support for affixations and, annotations

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 01.06.2021 21:47, João Távora wrote:
> In what way?  Really, all other things being equal, in what way is
> threading arguments through lots of functions, bloating the arglist,
> implementations and the docstrings of said functions, calling group-fun
> multiple times and in multiple places in minibuffer.el better than_not_
> doing those things?

Why do you think it forces you to "thread" them?

Firs of all, you can construct the same composite values you wanted 
using the current calling convention of the group-function. And then use 
them the same way.

Whether this results in better minibuffer.el code is debatable: your 
diff has more additions than deletions, and one rather long line.

OTOH, someone in a different codebase might appreciate that the 
group-function decouples the mapping to group names from the 
transformations of the items, and thus one can do the latter closer to 
where the items are printed, instead of having to "thread" the 
transformed values to their place of use (from where the grouping logic 
was called).

Using a text property is a handy workaround, but ideally one shouldn't 
have to use it.