Re: company 0.2.1 -- extensible inline text completion mechanism

[Toby Cubitt]

Nikolaj Schumacher wrote:
> Toby Cubitt <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> There's also Completion-UI (which I believe is also quite a bit older than
>> both the others, though I could be wrong).
> 
> Not that much.  If you remember, I submitted a patch for one of the
> earlier versions, right before I worked on company.

Ah yes, I'd forgotten my history :)

> The reason was that
> I came up with the overlay-based tooltip, because regular tooltips were
> (are) too slow on my system.  At that time CompletionUI didn't seem
> stable (and fast)  enough for the amount of stuff I wanted to change.

Do both auto-complete and company-mode both implement the overlay-based
tooltip then? If so, would you consider helping port it to CompletionUI?
All that's required are some kind of `show-pseudo-tooltip' and
`hide-pseudo-tooltip' functions that I can call to do the obvious. Given
those, it should be a doddle to plug it in as a new modular interface to
CompletionUI. (I agree this wasn't all that easy in previous versions, but
recent version make doing this *much* simpler.)

>> The Completion-UI completion sources (or "back-ends") are also fully
>> modular, and Henry Weller has sent me code that hooks company-mode
>> back-ends into Completion-UI, which I will include in the next release.
> 
> Great.  I guess that proves I did a good job at the interface.  ;)

It turns out I was slightly inaccurate here. As Henry has pointed out to
me offline, he actually sent me code that hooks "anything" sources into
Completion-UI. Apparently it's less easy to write a macro to do this for
company-mode sources, but it's very easy to port them by hand.

> I would love to have a standardized interface, though.  That would be a
> good place to start.

That would be great. Then I could delegate maintaining the Completion-UI
sources to someone else, and concentrate on the core functionality and
user interfaces. Perhaps we can discuss this offline...

Toby