Re: Emacs completion matches selection UI

[Toby Cubitt]

On Sun, Jan 05, 2014 at 11:03:45PM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > I agree.  The `completion-at-point-functions' API is convoluted compared
> > to either the Company-native API or the Completion-UI API.
> 
> Partly for historical reasons, but partly because it handles more
> complex kinds of completions, such as file-name completion with
> partial-completion.

Unless I've misunderstood what file-name completion with
partial-completion is, I'm pretty sure Completion-UI can either handle
this already with its non-prefix-completion sources, or these could
readily be extended to do so.

Completion-UI can handle completion sources that select an arbitrary
substring of the buffer to be 'completed', and substitute arbitrary text
for that string, whilst keeping track of what the original string was so
you can continue completing it.

> > On the other hand, it's already part of Emacs and is sufficiently
> > flexible (if a little ugly).  So we may be stuck with it now...
> 
> Extending the company API or the completion-ui API to handle things
> like filename completion (including the issues linked to handling
> quoting/unquoting) is far from obvious,

What's the roadblock here? I don't see it.

> so whether we like it or not, I think that
> completion-at-point-functions is not really negotiable.

I figured you'd say that :-/

T.
-- 
Dr T. S. Cubitt
Royal Society University Research Fellow
and Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge
Centre for Quantum Information
DAMTP, University of Cambridge

email: address@hidden
web:   www.dr-qubit.org