Re: Why fido, icycles, ido, icomplete

[Ergus]

On Wed, Nov 06, 2019 at 02:30:31PM -0700, Daniele Nicolodi wrote:
> Hello Ergus,
>
> On 06-11-2019 14:20, Ergus wrote:
> > 90% of the emacs users are actually using ivy or helm...
> how do you come to this estimate? I don't think it is something you can
> derive solely from download statistics.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Cheers,
> Daniele

Hi Daniele:

When I started using emacs I was very confused about what to use for
completion, so I checked: download statistics and github starts (now
there is the package "paradox" to get that information in the package
manager).

But also the community size of spacemacs (with 188000 starts and 4600
forks) compared to vanilla emacs and a Spanish telegram group for emacs
(197 members now) and a reddit thread related (I can't find it now).

I actually told 90% to be conservative; because 100% of the comments I
have seen related to completion use helm or ivy exclusively. The few
people I knew were using ido 3 years ago (due to the performance issues
in helm) have moved to ivy now.

On the other hand, in my work there is a user who use emacs without any
config at all (because it is in a common server), so as I suppose there
are other people in the same situation I keep that 10% for them. But I
don't think he will be annoyed by an improvement like setting a better
completion by default.

In any case the key of my mail was more about why to maintain so many
alternatives (it is hard to maintain, confusing for the user, complex to
find information (at least in the package manager there is a description
so the user can discover packages there)) and add another one instead of
decide for the best we have and maintain and improve it as much as
possible. Or provide lower level api functionalities for the popular
packages (like ivy), move the others (like ido) to elpa and keep in
built-in emacs only the minimal.

Best,
Ergus