Re: `completion-in-region'

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> The question is whether matching like this should be the default. IMO, no.

It's not even a question.


        Stefan


PS: I could imagine using such a matching scheme by default at some
point in the future, but it would need to be significantly refined.
The main problem is that by turning "abc" into a global like "*a*b*c" we
tend to get many matches of variable quality.  So we'd need some way to
compare the quality and only keep the ones that have the best quality.

At least that's what I try to do in my "forgive" completion-style (don't
look for it, I don't think I've sent it out anywhere yet) which allows
"abc" to match not only "albacore" but also "yacc" (i.e. it can
insert&delete chars): the ability to delete chars means that
fundamentally any input string can match any completion candidate, so
there it's pretty obvious that you need to sort the candidates by "how
close" they are to the input string.

Note that the current default setting already does (a very limited form
of) this kind of "quality sorting" since it only considers
partial-completion matches if there aren't any prefix completions.