Re: Interactive guide for new users

[Ergus]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 03:01:42AM +0300, Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> On 12.09.2020 16:43, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
> To my knowledge, if we want to come close to what those other editors 
> show, our current best bet is icomplete-vertical (or something similar 
> to it)

I think that "something similar" is ivy+counsel. It works pretty fine,
lighter than helm and it is in elpa. The api engine is very polished and
the experience in general is better than with icomplete because it also
has integrated all the completion engines, sorting and formats in a
modular way.

> PLUS a packages that moves the minibuffer to either the center 
> or the top of the frame (or makes it seem live the minibuffer has been 
> moved, of course).
ivy-posframe also offers this with the ivy engine. I already wrote to
the author to move it to elpa and he is asking the contributors if they
have all the gnu documentation. (He already has as he is the author of
posframe and company-posframe)

The only drawback is that posframes does not work in a terminal
interface as company do... (I totally ignore that's the difference
between a posframe and a normal window)

Any way I think it is always better to have more than one option before
deciding which one we will "officially" support.

> Here's a showcase if one such package in action:
>
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/honmaple/emacs-maple-minibuffer/master/screenshot/example.gif
>
> In particular, see the examples where the dropdown is displayed at the 
> top and in the middle of the frame.
>
> The package itself is here: 
> https://github.com/honmaple/emacs-maple-minibuffer
>
> There are already several packages that try to do something like this, 
> but this one seemed the most stable last time I tried.
>
> Even so, it has unfortunate limitations like not being able to adjust 
> the height according to the number of available completions. And 
> different features that use minibuffer are likely to expose other 
> sharp corners of this (very impressive) hack. Like, some previous 
> version of icomplete-vertial failed to work with it. The current seems 
> to work fine, though.
I have been trying ivy-posframe and it seems that the posframe library
solves this for them.

> So some low-level work/redesign of minibuffer code might be needed for 
> this to be ready for wide public.
>
> Relatedly, there exists a similar effort by out very own Martin 
> Rudalics, but the discussion about polishing it has died down around 
> here: 
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-06/msg00171.html
>
> Previously: 
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-05/msg03167.html