Re: Why fido, icycles, ido, icomplete

[João Távora]

Ergus <address@hidden> writes:

> Thanks for the answer it is very clarifying for me now. Maybe you should
> add all this information somewhere in the documentation.

*all* this informatino is a bit much, don't you think, but there is
 already documentation.

> I actually have very strong feelings behind ido in 2019 (I know I am a
> sort of apostate for this). But I think it is something that needs to be
> removed/deprecated/substituted for the good of newer alternatives like

The idea of fido-mode is indeed to obsolete ido mode.  But it's still a
bit far away.  And removing is yet another matter: i don't think there's
any harm in having ido.  Of course, if fido-mode ever becomes a perfect
superset of ido, and removing it proves mostly harmless, OK I guess.

> The intention is to move the users to the newer functionalities so they
> can get the best possible first impression.

I agree with this.  But I don't agree with the "newer" = "best
possible".  These things take time to settle and one of the strong
points of Emacs is, paradoxically, its resistance to change.  Its like a
movie theater where there are only classics playing.  Lots of grainy
footage but all movies are superb.

> I think Abo-abo actually tried to modify ido to improve it and he
> finally ended implementing ivy... was easier that way.

And I found icomplete.el, which is already in Emacs.

> I will pray you to do the same for ivy... please please...

Well, I did very little.  The author did all the work.  I and Stefan
helped (mostly Stefan in the last part).  The evolution is registered
here https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/issues/2165.

You can point Ivy's author to this thread.

> think ivy is now much better integrated than helm before, but for sure
> there will be things missing you could help to improve.

>>still annoyingly (and legitimately) there, and we can't just change
>>icomplete-mode's defaults like that.
>>
> I have never used icomplete... so I don't know what ido provides that
> icomplete can't. So where is the gap? Is a part of the gap fixed in helm
> or ivy for example?

You are miscommunicating: the "gap" is whatever doesn't quite work in
icomplete-mode to make it work just like ido-mode.  It's the behaviour
of RET, C-k, C-d and some other things.

> Maybe this paragraph should go in the manual in the ido section
> suggesting to switch to fido in order to improve fido as much as
> possible and deprecate the actual ido implementation in the future... (I
> have a dream, please don't burn me for this "A man can dream... a man
> can dream")

There's already a paragraph in the manual.

       An alternative to Icomplete mode is Fido mode.  This is very similar
    to Icomplete mode, but retains some functionality from a popular
    extension called Ido mode (in fact the name is derived from “Fake Ido”).
    Among other things, in Fido mode, ‘C-s’ and ‘C-r’ are also used to
    rotate the completions list, ‘C-k’ can be used to delete files and kill
    buffers in-list.  Another noteworthy aspect is that ‘flex’ is used as
    the default completion style (*note Completion Styles::).
    ‘
       To enable Fido mode, type ‘M-x fido-mode’, or customize the variable
     fido-mode’ to ‘t’ (*note Easy Customization::).

I also put something in NEWS.

You (or anyone else) can propose changes it, if you want.  I put it in
the icomplete section because it's really very closely related to
icomplete-mode.  Maybe I could add a reference to the ido-mode manual
(just discovered it exists).

Don't know how to do inter-manual references, though, this one is
emacs/buffers.texi the other is misc/ido.texi.

João