Re: Inline completion preview

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 27/10/2023 14:49, João Távora wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 7:38 PM Eli Zaretskii<eliz@gnu.org>  wrote:
> > > 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.  The result of
> > using overlay strings is simply not visually appealing, and on top of
> > that it causes quite a few complications for the display code.
> I think agree with this, but it should work with Non-GUI Emacs, too right?
> In a TUI Emacs, there have been these nice pop-up menus for a while.  At first
> sight the display infrastructure being used there seems suitable for showing
> completions, so I wonder if that infrastructure couldn't be refactored
> then reused
> for a completion popup in core.

I very much agree with this too.

In TUI, the menu popups implementation could be partially reused.

In GUI, someone could look into bringing posframe (a GNU ELPA packages 
which is based on child frames) into the core in some shape or form. But 
the hard part is debugging how the child frames interact with various 
platforms and window managers -- this is where the majority of its bugs 
lie, and we seem to lack that qualification (or at least the qualified 
people don't seem to have enough free time). Or the popups could use 
something else in GUI, IDK.