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

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

>> > I already mentioned that you can put the _full_ candidate
>> > -- whatever Lisp object it might be -- on the _display_
>> > candidate, which is just a string.
>> 
>> I missed that the first time around! That's an interesting approach, and
>> one that hadn't occurred to me. In the simplest case it ends up being
>> way, way more code than just referencing the alist again, 
>
> Why do you think so?  You have the string; you just use
> `get-text-property' to get from it anything you need.
>
> (Not to mention that looking up a key in an alist (1)
> takes time and (2) doesn't allow for duplicate keys.)

I mean that using `put-text-property' on one side of the
`completing-read' and `get-text-property' on the other is more code
(okay, maybe I was exaggerating, but it's still more code) than building
an alist on one side of the `completing-read' and then using
(cdr (assoc-string on the other. There may be other advantages to the
approach, but what I'd like to see is `completing-read' (or
`selecting-read') doing this job itself.