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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: philipk@posteo.net, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2021 03:04:09 +0300
> 
> >> I don't always know what file name I want to type either, and either
> >> guess by typing a part of the word and pressing TAB. Or type multiple
> >> relevant words at once, if the completion UI allows it (that's very
> >> helpful for choosing a project-relative file name in project-find-file).
> > 
> > Never happens to me, and probably never will.  If I don't know what to
> > type, I first find out (by "other means").
> 
> Let me expand on one of the previous examples. There is this command, 
> project-find-file, which expects you to choose among a number 
> (thousands?) of long-ish file names relative to the project root.
> 
> Do you also always precisely know the file name you want to visit in 
> advance?

Yes, pretty much.  Although I must qualify that: I don't (yet) use
project.el features except for testing.

> And so never really make use of the discoverability side-effect of
> the completion buffer?

Never.  As I said: for me, completion is not a discoverability tool,
it's a type-saving tool.  I use other features for discovering stuff.

> >> But Company is just as useful in "needs help in typing as few characters
> >> as possible" kind of scenarios.
> > 
> > But its goal is still different, and doesn't make much sense in my
> > completion use cases.  In fact, whenever I need to use programs that
> > only provide the "selection" type, I frequently am annoyed and many
> > times need to repeatedly type the same input until I get it right.
> 
> I would hope that "Emacs with company-mode enabled" is not among such 
> programs.

Emacs cannot be one such program, because it doesn't provide _only_
the selection type: there's always the usual completion.