Re: VOTE: Changing completions-common-part face's default

[João Távora]

On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 11:38 PM Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> wrote:

> Important for the completion style author mostly, though. It's not like
> a regular user could do something about it. Isn't that right?

Not at all, no. I was using flex before I became an author of a
flex method and I liked it. I cant unbecome an author of a flex
method.

I'm 100% with Drew here (thou not so scientific).  I use flex (before
and after flex in Emacs proper) to explore a namespace of symbols.  I
work in an application that has may thousands of very long CL symbols.
In these symbols, some words appear inconsistently, middle, end or
beginning, depending on the "era" they were created (this is a system
as old as Emacs, by the way, dates to the 80's).

One of the main use cases I have for the highlighting is to
input that keyword to see what "era" symbol I want.  I don't know
the symbol I want until I start seeing the large list. Then I add another
little sub-concept word to narrow down, and repeat. Flex helps
me explore. I wish I could share with you the function names
I have to work with, but as you can understand, I can't.

As another data point, before I had flex I used a lot of SLIME's
apropos with a regexp to the same effect.  Either it had the
highlighting already or I added it (I don't remember now). I also
used slime-fuzzy, another flex written around 2006 for SLIME.
It already had the highlighting of the pattern (bold :-) Anyway that
highlighting was precious.

> > So that in the case of "lzy", I can choose between "the-lazy-fox"
> > and "le-zorg-yorg". Both can be reasonable intentions at different
> > points in time.
> Okay, but... our particular flex implementation doesn't do the free-form
> matching like that.

It does: "lzy" matches both "the-lazy-fox" and "le-zorg-yorg".

> Do you intend to extend it in that direction?

You must have meant "lyz". Yes it is a possiblity that we want to
extend it, but the scoring becomes much more complex. And
the system becomes slower. We start approaching
google-search-box level smartness and I would need to
read up on that first.

> Okay. That would still mean two diffeerent execution flows.

Don't know what you mean exactly. But yes, I guess. When
using prefix I am focused on one thing, when using flex I am
focused on another thing.  I think that already happens anyway
(the internal focus of the user).

But I don't use prefix much nowadays, fortunately. The beginning
of a name has no special place in my mind.

But Juri has given as an example a search box that does
exactly this mixing _in the same search results_.

> Because its main frontend is a popup which looks and, to an extent,
> behaves like the completion popups in other editors. So it's really
> expected to behave more or less the same. company-tng also implements
> one of the simplified workflows from the other editors.

I don't see much difference in the way I use popups and icomplete's
minibuffer for example.  Or *Completions*. A popup is just placed
in a different part of the screen, and, versus *Completions* it is more
"jittery". But it's exactly the same for me.

João