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

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 02.06.2021 10:48, João Távora wrote:
> Would you rather if "flickered" to "?/?"  ?  Or would
> you rather redisplay is inhibited until the totals are known?  Other
> completers may use this last option, but I personally dislike sluggish
> typing response.

You can try following the recent change in Company for asynchronous 
backends, where we do redisplay soon after the user typed, briefly 
showing "outdated" completions with the new input. And then updating it 
as soon as the new result is computed.

icomplete's implementation is this approach should be a lot easier to 
do, too. This seems to work okay:

diff --git a/lisp/icomplete.el b/lisp/icomplete.el
index 91bbb60013..29138e089e 100644
--- a/lisp/icomplete.el
+++ b/lisp/icomplete.el
@@ -154,7 +154,8 @@ icomplete--initial-input

 (defun icomplete-pre-command-hook ()
  (let ((non-essential t))
-   (icomplete-tidy)))
+   ;; (icomplete-tidy)
+   ))

 (defun icomplete-post-command-hook ()
   (let ((non-essential t)) ;E.g. don't prompt for password!


I would also suggest lowering the default of icomplete-compute-delay to 
0.1 or even 0.05.

With 300ms delay, the new behavior does look a little weird.

> And the whole constant updating thing is about
> "flickering" anyway.

Experience shows the above is a lot less jarring then hiding all 
completions ("blinking" with the empty background) and then showing them 
again.