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

[Gregory Heytings]

> > 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)?
>
> I think the main difference is in the UI. The default completion UI for 
> Emacs will expand text in-place. M-x tdoe <TAB> becomes 
> toggle-debug-on-error, with the initials style. This appears to make 
> sense for well structured text, such as commands or files.
>
> Selection are probably situations where you want more visual feedback, 
> and it would make sense to present a list/tree by default. I don't think 
> that this has to be strictly about text.
>
> Generally speaking, you can complete the textual representation of 
> anything or select the object themselves. I don't think that either is 
> always better, but I think we can do better than selecting textual 
> representations.

Okay, I think I understand your viewpoint (a bit) better now.  But:

1. It seems to me that the UI you have in mind is closer to 'transient' 
than to 'completing-read'.

2. That UI already exists to some extent in Emacs, for example dired, 
imenu (either in the menu bar or bound to a mouse event), ibuffer, the 
speedbar, ...

3. Such a UI probably wouln't fit in the (by definition) limited space of 
a minibuffer.