Re: find-file-project

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 01/19/2016 05:20 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> Ah, indeed, I have a local hack which turns it into a "standard
> completion table" but I never pushed it (and I'm not sure it should be
> either, because it's not very pretty: the behavior doesn't fit very well).

Standard completion doesn't fit? And simply iterating between the 
suggestions fits it better?

What's the main difference between the list provided by filecache.el and 
the list of files used by project-find-file?

> > It's also one of the blockers for deprecating company-mode's
> > own backends.
>
> [ Side note: I recently changed nxml-mode to provide a proper capf, so
>    it now "works" with company-mode, but company mode usually kicks in
>    too late in my opinion.  If you have time to spare, I'd appreciate if
>    you could try to fine-tune it a bit.  ]

Too late how?

- If you have to wait too long after typing a few chars, you can lower 
company-idle-delay.
- If you have to type too many chars for completion to kick in, lower 
company-minimum-prefix-length? Alternatively, a "native" company backend 
can return a cons value with a fake "length" to compare against the 
latter variable's value (or t, to mean that the check will succeed). 
I've recently accepted a patch adding a similar capability to 
company-capf, on github: 
https://github.com/company-mode/company-mode/pull/450.

If nxml-mode completion always uses a limited set of 
tags/attributes/values, maybe it could always return t as the "prefix 
length". (I don't really know if that's true or not.)

> I was thinking of adding a new method to completion tables (beside the
> existing try, all, test, boundaries, and metadata), but maybe making
> them generics would work as well.

It seems to me the functional completion tables could be complex enough 
already.

> Actually, all the completion-table methods could be turned into
> generics, but that requires figuring out on what to dispatch since
> currently all completion tables are either functions, lists, arrays or
> hash-tables and the "new table types" are sub-cases of function.

lists/arrays/hash-tables could be handled by the default methods. Maybe 
functions, too (or use a different method for them, with a specializer 
using functionp?). "New" completion tables could be conses tag+function, 
or cl-structs.

But that's a bit of a separate concern: since completion-try-completion 
and completion-all-completions are on a higher level, I think *they* 
could be generics, whereas the all-completions/etc could stay as they are.

> > It would be great if you could file a bug and describe your current views on
> > this subject there, so it's not buried in this discussion.
>
> Done,

Thank you. Although you've omitted the part about generics, so I'm 
unsure where to continue that part of the discussion.