Re: [PATCH] (icomplete-vertical-mode): Add support for affixations and, annotations

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 24.05.2021 02:42, Juri Linkov wrote:
> And later your reply was that annotation-function is the old approach, and
> that the default completion frontend still doesn't use :company-kind.
> Any plans to add support for :company-kind to the default frontend?

I can try and write an experimental patch if people are interested.

But it would be better if it was then brought over the "finish line" by 
someone who regularly uses 'M-x completion-at-point'. Because this 
feature, applied to the UI in a general fashion, brings usability 
questions and I'm sure will trigger some old-timer concerns.

Consider Elisp completion. Currently we only show <f> annotation when 
the context is such that it is not certain that the completion is a 
function (e.g. the completions set is symbols which can be anything). 
But when all completions are functions, we don't show <f>.

The current company-kind implementation is informed by the expectations 
of IDE users, where the kind is always shown. We also split functions 
into special forms and "regular" functions, annotating the former as 
"keywords", to make it not entirely useless even in this context.

I do believe this is beneficial, but I'm also sure that not every user 
is going to like seeing <f> or <k> in the first column for all 
completions, always. Not at first, at least.