Re: Usability suggestion : completion for M-:

[Stefan Monnier]

>> But I think I stated that enough now, and you clearly stated your
>> position as well, so it could help to have other people advice on 
>> that concerning the *current implementation* of M-:

For what it's worth, I'm a bit annoyed by Emacs's inconsistent use of
TAB: in minibuffers, TAB behaves like in terminals to mean "complete",
where in normal buffers it usually means "indent".

But of course, "indent" can also make sense in minibuffers, and
"complete" also makes a lot of sense in normal buffers.

I have used for many years commands that do both bound to TAB: typically
my TAB first tries to indent, and if the indentation code didn't make any
change then TAB tries to complete.

It works OK as far as DWIMish things are concerned, but it has some
rough corners:
- if the indentation code always makes changes (e.g. because it cycles
  through several possible indentation points), then completion is
  never used.
- if the completion code only gets called when you repeat TAB, then
  well... you have to repeat TAB to get to completion.
- if not, then you get surprising results when you do TAB C-n TAB C-n
  ... intending to reindent a chunk of code and once of the lines
  happens to be properly indented already and you end up
  completing instead.

So it's not a satisfactory solution.


        Stefan