Re: master f6967d2 1/3: Allow for the completion buffer to be automatically selected

[Daniel Martín]

Theodor Thornhill <theo@thornhill.no> writes:

> Daniel Martín <mardani29@yahoo.es> writes:
>
>> I don't think I like this change to the minibuffer defaults.  It breaks
>> muscle memory and IMO is more incovenient when you need to show the
>> completion list many times.
>>
>
> Sorry for my ignorance, (and partly offtopic question) but why would you
> want to show the completion list many times?  Isn't that very slow when
> moving around files?
>
>> One typical workflow I have is doing something like C-x C-f TAB TAB to
>> see the list of completions and then continue typing to narrow the list
>> of completions.  After this commit, you need to switch back to the
>> minibuffer to continue completing things, which is annoying.
>>
>
> This feels very inefficient.  Wouldn't it be faster just having the
> completion candidates open, then narrowing?  I have always found the
> default emacs completion system very arcane, but I might be missing
> something.

Many people prefer to use a selection workflow for the minibuffer, yes,
the popularity of packages like ivy, selectrum, ido, icicles, helm,
etc. speak for itself.  But on master the implemented solution was more
or less an intermediate one where the completion list was not shown
automatically and the results were not filtered "on the fly".  IMO, that
kind of intermediate solution doesn't help much to attract people used
to that kind of workflow from other applications/Emacs packages, and
only annoy people used to vanilla completion.

Another experiment that might be more successful is to enable an ELPA
package like mct[1] by default, and offer a single option to revert to
the default minibuffer behavior, for people used to vanilla completion.

[1]: https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/mct.html