Re: Improvement proposals for `completing-read'

[Stefan Monnier]

> This is similar to what I am doing in my `consult-line` command, which is
> a Swiper equivalent. There I encode the line number in Unicode characters of
> some private plane and hide them with 'invisible or 'display.

I can understand the `invisible` but I would have used plain `%s` or
`number-to-string` rather than funny unicode chars.

> If I could mark that part of the string as 'unmatchable I would be happy to!

Fun fact: I use a locally-hacked isearch.el that lets me do `C-s NNNN`
to go to line NNNN.

> Maybe that's the cleaner solution? The nice advantage is that it would be
> backward compatible. I could just start to mark my prefixes as 'unmatchable

Why put it in the prefix rather than the suffix?

> and the basic completion style would suddenly start to work. On older Emacs
> versions everything would continue to work as is; the user is required to
> use a completion style which matches substrings,

If you put the line numbers in the suffix, then they won't bother
anyone, even with the most basic completion scheme.


        Stefan