Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Yuan Fu]

> On Apr 25, 2020, at 12:28 PM, ndame <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> 
>>> Is there such a thing? Or does learning emacs mostly pay off
>>> for the advanced user? I can't think of a feature right know where
>>> emacs shines for the casual user.
>> 
>> Org mode, magit, helm comes to my mind.
> 
> 
> Orgmode is included, but helm and magit are in melpa. Emacs should feature
> packages which are accessible for the new user without tinkering. Though,
> if the newbie.el which can setup a beginner friendly environment if emacs
> is started without config is allowed to add melpa to the package list and
> install helm/magit automatically then it's ok, because then it is instantly
> available  for the new user.
> 
> BTW, helm. Maybe the veterans don't recognize it, but the default emacs 
> completion
> is extremely clunky, especially if one comes from other modern tools.
> 
> A user accustomed to modern tools expects something like this:
> 
> https://resources.jetbrains.com/help/img/idea/2020.1/find_action_dialog.png
> 
> A vertical list which is instantly filtered as you type.
> 
> Compared to this the default completion is hoplessly old fashioned with its
> multicolumn text display and having to press for TAB for the results.
> 
> Icomplete is a step in the right direction. The above mentioned newbie.el
> should set it up instead of the default completion.
> 
> Though, it's a single line displaying completions, a vertical display
> could be better, especially if the entries are longer.
> 
> And someone did it already:
> 
> https://github.com/oantolin/icomplete-vertical
> 
> Icomplete-vertical should be adopted into the core as an option and this
> is how completion should be set up for newbies.
> 
> It's still not as good looking as the one on my first link, but it's
> almost there. It's vertical, it gives you instant results, so it's much
> closer to completion provided by modern tools (Idea, VsCode, etc.) than
> the default one.
> 


Thanks for sharing! I tried to use icomplete with “\n” separator, but 
encountered the problem that this package aims to solve. This should definitely 
be included as bugfix.

Yuan