Re: Why fido, icycles, ido, icomplete

[Stefan Monnier]

> On my Ido config, there is visual feedback about the parts of the candidate
> strings that matches the query and they are shown on a multi-column
> format that is dense and readable at the same time, IMO.

Great, I wasn't aware that it had been implemented for IDO.

> As I mentioned on a previous message, there is more than one way to skin
> a cat. Having a powerful and flexible (*) default completion method is
> great, but other approaches perhaps require things that does not fit
> with whatever framework you can provide.

Definitely.  Emacs makes it particularly easy to experiment this way and
develop solutions tuned for very specific situations.  IDO is a great
such example.  The number of "completion frameworks" out there for Emacs
is another example.

I see the task of Emacs maintainers as trying to consolidate those
"branches" of functionality so that their features can be used in
more circumstances.  Usually that only applies to some parts of the
functionality they offer, and very often it requires a complete rewrite
of those features.

The hardest part is often how to retrofit the "generic implementation"
of a feature into the package which originally first provided this
feature in an "ad-hoc" way, since as a general rule the generic
implementation isn't a perfect match.


        Stefan