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From: | Dmitry Gutov |
Subject: | bug#65137: 29.1; completion-substring-try-completion doesn't return the longest common substring |
Date: | Wed, 30 Aug 2023 02:25:41 +0300 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.13.0 |
On 29/08/2023 18:45, Spencer Baugh wrote:
Could you describe the usage scenario a little more? From my brief testing, the current behavior seems okay most of the time: you still get the short input which matches a bunch of strings (e.g. filenames), you can type a little more chars and narrow down. With your change, TAB will insert the most common prefix for all those completions, which in case of project-file can be a pretty long string. Not a huge problem, but on the face of it that doesn't seem like an improvement. So which scenario would that make better?As a very concrete example that I ran into frequently, for project-find-file if you have two files: dir/foo.ml dir/foo.mli and you input "foo" and press Tab, you get "foo.ml". But it is then impossible to expand that to dir/foo.ml using completion because of this bug. So you have to manually select dir/foo.ml if you want to visit that file, either by switching to *Completions* and selecting it or by using minibuffer-next-completion.
Now I understand, thank you. I guess this is something that certain environments (such as OCaml) are more prone to than others.
Also this problem seems somewhat unique to the default completion mechanism. If I use Ivy, or Helm, or Vertico, or even the "bare" icomplete-mode, they all have the notion of the currently selected completion, with a short key sequence to choose it.
E.g. with icomplete-mode on I would type until the needed completion is highlighted in the minibuffer and then press C-j (maybe press C-, or C-. to select it).
The default completion, as you say, has the means to do a similar thing with M-<up> and M-<down>, but it's less obvious and requires more keypresses.
After this bugfix, inputting "foo" and pressing Tab will expand to "dir/foo.ml". In general, this bug makes it impossible to input a file name with completion (in project-file) if that file name is a prefix of another file name. Like dir/foo and dir/foo.tar, or dir/foo.log and dir/foo.log.bak.
Your patch fixes that by expanding inputs into longer lines after TAB (meaning, the user will see their input text shift, sometimes considerably, to the right, and perhaps feel a little disoriented). It might be a minor thing, but a downside nevertheless.
I do wonder what Stefan thinks what would be the right behavior here.
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