RE: Can you recommand some good fonts for emacs22 ?

[Drew Adams]

> Drew, I may have opened my big mouth a bit early above... on a second
> try I'm politely prompted to insert a font name/string/regex.
> 
> Not sure what I may have done... to cause the first situation... when
> emacs sort of froze I may have pressed or click something to cause the
> full screen buffer to expand.

Dunno what happened. Sorry for your trouble.

> But this time, having loaded icicles, and set icy-mode, it appears to
> have destroyed completion at the M-x cmdline.

Are you using a window manager or using Emacs just with a terminal?

Icicles should work in both cases, but I have no experience with the latter, and
the user experience will be different in some ways. In particular, some of the
default Icicles key bindings will not work (because those keys are typically not
available in a terminal).

> For example... there is no completion for M-x icicles-<spc> or <tab>
> Also it apparently expects some specialized name to be inserted.
> Things like `*' or `adobe' get the error message:
>  [no-prefix-completion].

That sounds correct, actually. The prefix for Icicles commands and variables is
`icicle-', not `icicles-'. And SPC is self-inserting, by default - it does not
perform completion.

TAB should perform completion, however. It is font specs (full names, if you
like) that are the completion candidates. On my system (Windows), all of the
candidates start with `-outline' or `-raster'. When you use TAB, `*' is matched
literally, not as a wildcard.

If you use S-TAB instead, then `*' is a regexp wildcard, so to match a `*' you
need to use, for example, `[*]' or `\*'. However, you can turn off regexp
wildcards using `C-`' (during completion) - then, S-TAB does substring
completion. In that case, you can type, e.g., `c-*-' to match all font specs
that contain that string literally.

Example.
M-x icicle-font RET
Lucida S-TAB

That shows all font specs that contain `Lucida'.

M-k 

That erases the minibuffer input.

Courier.*normal-14 S-TAB

That matches all font specs that have `Courier' followed perhaps by something,
followed by `normal-14'.

You can type more input to narrow things down. And/or you can cycle among
candidates using the Page Up/Down keys (`prior', `next'), with S-TAB, or the
up/down arrow keys, with TAB - then RET to choose one.

> Your comment: "filter on font description parts" would seem 
> to indicate some part of font name but I find only something
> beginning with '-' works.  So a very special part of font name.

Me too. All font specs returned by `x-list-fonts', at least on my machine
(Windows), begin with `-'.

Icicles just uses `x-list-fonts' to get the list of available fonts. Then it
makes these available as completion candidates. Your minibuffer input then
filters those. 

If you use TAB to complete, then your input must start with `-', since it must
be a completion prefix. If you use S-TAB instead, your input can be just a
substring or a regexp to match against the candidates. If you hit TAB or S-TAB
with the minibuffer empty, you will see all available fonts.

> For example `-'  causes all fonts to be listed, while
> `adobe' fails to list any and gives the message:
> [no-prefix-completion]
> 
> And `-adobe' appears to list all adobe fonts.

Yes, that all makes sense. See if my explanation above helps.

> But something like `-.*bold'  fails. 

With TAB it should fail, since you don't have a font that has those seven chars
as a prefix. But with S-TAB it should succeed, as should just `.*bold'.

HTH. If my description doesn't seem to correspond to what you experience, and
you think there might be a bug, please use `M-x icicle-report-bug'. Be sure to
specify your Emacs version.