Re: Why fido, icycles, ido, icomplete

[João Távora]

Ergus <address@hidden> writes:

> 1) Do we really need another confusing mode (fido-mode)? instead of
> improve one of the already existing alternatives with just an option to
> use flex?

I'm sorry you find the name confusing.  I find it appealing (it's "fake
ido"), but we can change it (Stefan proposed icomplete-ido-mode).

Now, I wish I could just put 'flex' (and many other things) in ido-mode.
Actually the matter is much more complicated.  Ido mode is a completely
separate completion system that doesn't respect Emacs completion
interfaces (completion-in-region-functions,
completion-at-point-functions, completion-styles, etc etc etc ).  This
means it doesn't work nicely for M-x, C-h f, and many many other
completion situations.  So, believe me, I tried to change it... and gave
up immediately (but go ahead, open lisp/ido.el hehehe).

Recently, we worked together with the Helm developer to help Helm to
abide by a greater number of Emacs completion interfaces.  It should
have, among other benefits, the interesting result that you can use Helm
matching styles in icomplete.el's frontend.  Or company's.  Or Emacs's
flex in Helm.  So I don't think it's true there's no cooperation.

Maybe you can convince someone to do that for ido.el, idk.

I was a heavy Ido addict for many years because it has the best
interface, hands down, much better than Ivy, or Helm, IMO of course.  I
also know many people in my company that swear by it.  But the
implementation was impossibly hard to hack on.  Then I found
icomplete.el, with very lean implementation (around 8x less lines) and
the closest gap to ido-mode.  I improved a decent part of icomplete.el,
so Icomplete mode is now better by itself.  But that gap to ido-mode is
still annoyingly (and legitimately) there, and we can't just change
icomplete-mode's defaults like that.

So fido-mode.  It's really just icomplete with slightly different
defaults that emulate ido mode as close as possible.  Indeed the
specific contract of fido-mode is to emulate ido-mode as much as
possible, to use it as a reference, so if you find something in the
emulation that can be improved, please share.

Regarding your other points, <shrug> that's just the way Emacs is.  I
like lean implementations that play along with the rest of Emacs, so I
chose icomplete.el to use and to hack on.

João