Re: What is the most useful potential feature which Emacs lacks? A: Autocompletion

[Konstantin Kharlamov]

Hello, my 50 cents. The most missing feature, which has almost every
text editor out there except Emacs, is no doubt sane autocompletion.

"But there are autocompletion plugins!" someone might say. Okay,
here's the problem: due to lack of multithreading, they usually set a
timeout before autocompletion appears. This makes plugins limited to
just one usecase: when a user doesn't know what to type next (like,
doesn't remember exact method name, etc.). But most often people know
what they want, and they type very fast. In this case what
autocompletion should provide is prediction. And Emacs autocompletion
plugins are failing bad at this: if you type fast, this means timeout
is never expired, and completion never appears.

I could set timeout to 0 (which I used to do some years ago), but this
often results in terrible lags.

And it gets worse: even if timeout expires, depending on completion
backend you can get a freeze. For example, how about completion from
tags backend, where the TAGS file is 183MB in size! This is the actual
TAGS file I got from LibreOffice project.

Lack of such simple but immensely useful feature is so disappointing
that some years ago I was trying to migrate over to some other
editor. And when I was asked "is it worth learning Emacs", I was
recommending Vim. Because, while I use Emacs with Evil mode, and I
admit this is much more powerful than Vim with plugins (which I use
too for quick edits in terminal), but sane autocompletion is something
anyone would expect to work out of the box. And the fact it not only
doesn't work OOTB, but there's no way to make it even work, will sure
turn away users quite quickly.

On Mon, 2020-05-11 at 20:09 +0000, ndame wrote:
> There is a discussion on Reddit about sponsoring development of
> multithreading in Emacs, and people there say it's too hard, takes a
> lot of time and it doesn't even bring that much benefit to the user.
>
> If this is the case (is it?) then what are those other features which
> could bring much more tangible benefits for the user and assuming
> somebody works on them full time sponsored by the community they can
> be implemented in, say,  a few months?