Re: [ELPA] New package: vertico

[Tassilo Horn]

Hi Daniel,

>> Now I have two questions:
>> 1. Shouldn't there be a command like `th/vertico-complete' which
>>     completes the common part of the candidates?
>
> Vertico follows the design where you put less importance on the
> prefix/TAB completion but instead excepts the user to enter more text
> for narrowing, which works well with the orderless completion style.
>
> But note that Vertico is fully compatible with default completion, so
> as you observed you can just use `minibuffer-complete`.  If you bind
> `minibuffer-complete` to the `vertico-map` it will work.  See
> https://github.com/minad/vertico#keymap.
>
> Is that good enough or do you have something else in mind?

It's just almost good enough.  It completes correctly but the candidates
are not refreshed.  For example, with find-file, it might complete
uniquely to a directory but still display the siblings of that directory
rather than its contents.  That's why I've sneaked in a call to
`vertico--exhibit' in my `th/vertico--complete' command.

>> 2. One annoying effect with the above command and vertico is that the
>>     typical completion messages such as "Next char not unique" bump point
>>     to the right, i.e., with stock minibuffer completion you have
>>       my-input| [Next char not unique]
>>     whereas with vertico you have
>>       my-input [Next char not unique]|
>>     where | indicates point.  Why is that?
>
> Yes, I've also observed issues with minibuffer messages appearing at
> the wrong place. Vertico uses overlays to display the candidate count
> and the candidate list, similar to Icomplete. Icomplete however
> removes the overlay in the pre-command-hook and puts the overlay back
> in the post-command-hook. I am not doing that. I just move the overlay
> to the end but it seems this solution is not good enough. Since I have
> not yet understood fully what the problem is I haven't done anything
> yet to fix the issue.
>
> Besides, my recommendation would be to deactivate those messages. I
> think they are pretty annoying. I suspect even more so in combination
> with aggressive-completion.

Yes, `completion-auto-help' makes absolutely no sense with vertico (and
can be disabled with aggressive-completion using
`aggressive-completion-auto-completion-help').  Probably the same is
true for `completion-show-inline-help'.

Bye,
Tassilo