From: Eshel Yaron <me@eshelyaron.com>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Inline completion preview
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2023 21:39:16 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <m15y2tp40r.fsf@eshelyaron.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <83h6mdfcv2.fsf@gnu.org> (Eli Zaretskii's message of "Thu, 26 Oct 2023 21:38:25 +0300")
Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> From: Eshel Yaron <me@eshelyaron.com>
>> Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2023 20:11:17 +0200
>>
>> I want to propose adding an inline completion preview mechanism to Emacs.
>>
>> By inline completion preview, I mean an overlay that pop ups after point
>> showing one of the candidates for at-point completion. You can view
>> this mechanism as giving you a hint or suggesting a certain completion.
>
> I wish people would work on adding to Emacs some a GUI infrastructure
> for showing such completion candidates like other IDEs do, instead of
> once again using overlays with after-string properties.
I'm not sure I know enough about the benefits of other approaches, what
do you envision?
> The result of using overlay strings is simply not visually appealing,
It doesn't seem to me very different from what I see in other editors,
but I guess that's a matter of taste.
> and on top of that it causes quite a few complications for the display
> code.
>
>> Of course, there are a few Emacs packages that provide such a facility
>> already. Namely, I found and played around with the following packages:
>>
>> - `company` includes three variants of such a preview frontend, one of
>> them enabled by default, that show a completion candidate provided by
>> `company`'s backends. See [0].
>> - `fancy-dabbrev` does something similar for `dabbrev` abbreviations.
>> See [1].
>> - `mono-complete` provides such a completion preview frontend with
>> several pluggable backends, including `completion-at-point` and
>> `dabbrev`. See [2].
>> - `corfu-candidate-overlay` implements such a preview for
>> `completion-at-point` candidates that relies on the `corfu` in-buffer
>> completion interface. See [3].
>
> You list those, but don't say why you think we should have yet another
> such facility, and in core on top of that.
Sorry, that might have not been clear enough, I wrote:
ISTM that the best approach is a simple library that uses only
`completion-at-point` as a backend, because `completion-at-point` is
already extensible enough to support a variety of completion
backends.
None of the aforementioned packages take that approach, so I wrote
`completion-preview.el` do demonstrate and test this approach. As to
the question of adding this feature to core, since it's quite a simple
and useful addition, I just think it could be nice to have it OOTB.
> If we want something like that in core, I'd rather include Company,
> not invent something new (and partial).
That works too, of course :)
FWIW My proposal is not really novel, it uses standard techniques that
you find in all the packages I mentioned. It just does without an
extra level of frontend/backend indirection and targets
`completion-at-point` directly, which makes it a bit simpler.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-10-26 19:39 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 51+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-10-26 18:11 Inline completion preview Eshel Yaron
2023-10-26 18:38 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-10-26 19:39 ` Eshel Yaron [this message]
2023-10-27 5:52 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-10-27 15:43 ` Eshel Yaron
2023-10-27 17:12 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-10-27 18:13 ` Eshel Yaron
2023-10-27 20:25 ` chad
2023-10-28 16:47 ` Juri Linkov
2023-10-28 19:01 ` Eshel Yaron
2023-10-29 16:24 ` Alexander Adolf
2023-10-29 23:29 ` João Távora
2023-10-30 9:25 ` Juergen Fenn
2023-10-30 9:36 ` João Távora
2023-10-30 11:04 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-10-30 12:42 ` Alexander Adolf
2023-10-30 13:01 ` João Távora
2023-10-30 17:32 ` Alexander Adolf
2023-10-30 17:52 ` João Távora
2023-10-30 13:20 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-10-30 17:43 ` Alexander Adolf
2023-10-30 22:49 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-10-31 6:50 ` Eshel Yaron
2023-10-31 17:31 ` Alexander Adolf
2023-10-31 17:43 ` Eshel Yaron
2023-10-31 23:29 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-11-01 8:30 ` Eshel Yaron
2023-11-01 10:11 ` João Távora
2023-11-01 10:44 ` Eshel Yaron
2023-11-01 11:07 ` João Távora
2023-11-01 12:17 ` Eshel Yaron
2023-11-01 12:23 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-11-01 14:07 ` Juergen Fenn
2023-11-01 19:57 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-11-01 12:08 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-11-01 12:14 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-11-01 12:24 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-11-01 12:29 ` Eshel Yaron
2023-11-01 12:32 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-11-01 12:34 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-11-01 12:36 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-11-01 13:28 ` Po Lu
2023-11-01 19:49 ` Dmitry Gutov
2023-10-27 8:58 ` Ihor Radchenko
2023-10-27 15:53 ` Eshel Yaron
2023-10-27 11:49 ` João Távora
2023-10-27 11:52 ` João Távora
2023-10-27 12:18 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-10-27 12:55 ` João Távora
2023-10-27 12:58 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-10-27 13:05 ` Dmitry Gutov
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