Re: Stepping Back: A Wealth Of Completion systems Re: [ELPA] New package: vertico

[Gregory Heytings]

> I have the feeling all these completion systems are encouraging 
> confusion around how to use completing-read. That is the 0th point that 
> is missing here: Are you completing (expanding text) or selecting 
> (narrowing options).

I've been thinking about this, and I'm not sure I understand what the real 
difference between "completing" and "selecting" is.  Do I understand 
correctly that the difference is between, for example, expanding command 
names (completing), and choosing an emoji in a list (selecting)?

> It might therefore be necessary to actually implement a "selecting-read" 
> function, that could be used more or less like completing-read, but that 
> provides a better default UI not based around completing text but 
> actually selecting objects/items.

Given that Emacs is primarily keyboard-driven, it seems to me that the 
most efficient way to select an item is, and will always be, to use a 
textual representation of the items in the list to select them.  C-x 8 RET 
does this, you (can) select an unicode character with its name.  For 
example C-x 8 RET inf RET inserts the infinity symbol.  Or course you 
could also navigate through the ~45000 unicode characters to select the 
one you want, but that would be far less efficient.