RE: [External] : Re: Updating *Completions* as you type

[Drew Adams]

I'm not asking you, or anyone, to use Icicles.
Unfortunately, talking about its features can
perhaps give the opposite impression.

As I tried to make clear in my posts, their aim
was to mention various Icicles features I think
are relevant to this thread - not to advertise
Icicles or suggest its use.

The point was to encourage consideration of such
or similar features as useful and perhaps worth
adding to vanilla Emacs.  Nothing more.  

Icicles is just a reference point here.  Its doc
about such features might hopefully provide some
food for thought.  _What users can do_ is the
point, not how such features can be implemented.

It's good to see others coming around to similar
feature ideas now.  Knowledge that such features
work _in combination_, and they have done so for
quite a while, should be helpful, I hope.
___

Wrt la petite histoire -

To my knowledge, the first appearance of any
incremental completion was in icomplete-mode.
But that wasn't a completion whose result you
could _use_; it was only completion you could
_see_ (and only a few completions).  You could
use it only as a guide/preview of what you could
then type.  (Much later, completion of input was
finally added to icomplete-mode.)

Next was IswitchB, which later became the model
for Ido.  Completion candidates were shown only
in the minibuffer (and again, only a few) - no
use of *Completions* to show candidates.

Icicles came after icomplete-mode and IswitchB,
and before Ido.  It introduced incremental
completion showing candidates in *Completions*;
cycling among candidates (notion of "current"
candidate); on-the-fly sorting of them; etc.