Re: [Nano-devel] adding a word-completion feature to nano

[Benno Schulenberg]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2016, at 09:57, Sumedh Pendurkar wrote:
> Separation between two words is 2 spaces.

I've been looking a bit at how Vim and Emacs do completion.

When running 'vim NEWS', typing i, and then typing: port ^N,
vim completes the word to "portera", and additionally shows
all five possibilities below it.  I find the latter distracting
(and the words are shown in colors that are hard to read).
Typing ^N again will replace "portera" with the next word in
the list: "Portorož".  More ^Ns will cycle through "portability",
"ported", and "portable", and then back to what was typed: "port".

Running 'emacs -nw NEWS', and typing: port M-/, emacs completes
the word to "portera", and for the rest is completely silent: it 
shows no messages.  Cool.  Further M-/s will cycle through the
different possibilities like vim, except when the last has been
shown: it will beep and say: "No further dynamic expansion for
`port' found".  Hm...  Don't know if I like the beep, but at
least it's clear that the cycle is complete and you're back
at what you typed.

Now nano.  Running 'src/nano +1 NEWS', and typing: port ^],
nano shows on the statusbar a list of possibilities, so I
must move my eyes from the top of the window to the bottom, 
then read what is written there, which is confusing because
the words are not in alphabetical order (related words are
not next to each other), then I have to decide which word I 
want, and then I have to look carefully which other character
or characters I have to type in order to get ^] to complete
it fully for me, then type those characters, and then type ^]
again...  Oof!  Very cumbersome.  I think word-completion in
nano should work similar to M-/ in Emacs.  What do you say?

Benno

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