Re: Sorting command completions by recency

[Stefan Monnier]

>>>> This code puts the recent commands at the top as well,
>>>> but probably it needs to be opt-in:
>>> Makes sense to me, and, yes.
>> FWIW, the minibuffer.el code already uses this kind of sorting for the
>> list of completions used in things like `icomplete` and
>> `completion-cycle-threshold`.
>> For *Completions* the sort was kept alphabetical so far because that's
>> also useful (for example in the case of M-x completion, it makes it
>> easier to skip over blocs of commands sharing the same prefix).
>> So, while I think it can be useful to sort by some kind of "guessed
>> usefulness" such as presence in the history, I don't think this should
>> be forced by the completion table of commands.
> Maybe it would make sense to have a general option to configure this history
> sorting. When the table doesn't specify its own sorting one could opt in to
> always sort base on history.

Agreed.
It'd make sense to have it as a global option, like
`completion-cycle-threshold` and it would also make sense to be able to
override it individually via `completion-category-overrides` (which is
also the case for the cycling behavior).


        Stefan