Re: Interactive guide for new users

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

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On 12.09.2020 16:43, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2020 15:18:02 +0200
>> From: Ergus <spacibba@aol.com>
>> Cc: ghe@sdf.org, casouri@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>
>>> "Spirit" is not what's important here, IMO.  What's important is the
>>> visual appearance and the available actions and their effects.  What I
>>> see out there is similar to Company, and quite different from
>>> icomplete-mode, even when augmented by the vertical sub-mode.
>>
>> We have xref-find-apropos and completion-at-point. But icomplete use is
>> totally different to company.
>>
>> icomplete is more a minibuffer completion engine useful while tipping
>> commands, of lookign for files. There a company panel is uncomfortable.
>>
>> While company-mode is a "suggestion menu" while editing. Maybe our error
>> have been to consider both as a single "feature".
> 
> We are miscommunicating.  I said "similar to Company", meaning that
> the completion drops down a vertical list of candidates that overlays
> the rest of the display.  AFAIK, no existing completion package offers
> something similar.

With a modest amount of work, Company could work in the minibuffer, as 
long as a frontend based on child frames is used (like 
company-posframe), `company-mode-on' is modified to allow operation 
inside minibuffer, and the minibuffer setup is altered to set 
completion-at-point-functions appropriately, so that Company knows which 
completions to offer.

That said, it would still be quite different from what VS Code, Atom and 
friends employ. See the attached screenshot for the Company-based example.

> So either we implement something similar (and
> offer it in that initial tour as an option), or we have to live with
> the fact that users will not find in Emacs completion that they expect
> to see.  In the latter case, I wonder why icomplete is deemed a step
> in the right direction, for reasons I already described: it's too
> complicated and confusion, IMO.

I don't see what's so complicated you see about icomplete-mode. If you 
have problems when trying to use it, perhaps you should ask questions?

To my knowledge, if we want to come close to what those other editors 
show, our current best bet is icomplete-vertical (or something similar 
to it) PLUS a packages that moves the minibuffer to either the center or 
the top of the frame (or makes it seem live the minibuffer has been 
moved, of course).

Here's a showcase if one such package in action:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/honmaple/emacs-maple-minibuffer/master/screenshot/example.gif

In particular, see the examples where the dropdown is displayed at the 
top and in the middle of the frame.

The package itself is here: 
https://github.com/honmaple/emacs-maple-minibuffer

There are already several packages that try to do something like this, 
but this one seemed the most stable last time I tried.

Even so, it has unfortunate limitations like not being able to adjust 
the height according to the number of available completions. And 
different features that use minibuffer are likely to expose other sharp 
corners of this (very impressive) hack. Like, some previous version of 
icomplete-vertial failed to work with it. The current seems to work 
fine, though.

So some low-level work/redesign of minibuffer code might be needed for 
this to be ready for wide public.

Relatedly, there exists a similar effort by out very own Martin 
Rudalics, but the discussion about polishing it has died down around 
here: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-06/msg00171.html

Previously: 
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-05/msg03167.html

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