Re: Updating *Completions* as you type

[Juri Linkov]

>>> Also, tangentially, I think probably we should rework
>>> minibuffer-complete-history and minibuffer-complete-defaults to be
>>> persistent - as in, regular TAB afterwards continues to complete history
>>> or defaults.  And there should be some way to reset back to normal.
>>> That would be a good complement to this completions-sort change, by
>>> maybe giving a way to switch on-demand to alphabetical sorting.  (I've
>>> long thought this would be good and useful, but in particular it's
>>> relevant for completions-auto-update since that will otherwise nearly
>>> immediately reset the displayed completions back to normal.)
>>
>> I think we should choose a key to toggle completion type between
>> history/default/regular completion.
>
> That works too of course, although it causes some more proliferation of
> keys.
>
> I'm curious, what is the intended usage of
> minibuffer-complete-{history,defaults}?  The fact that they only do a
> single completion has made them not very usable for me.

The currently limited use case is that you can type a substring,
then TAB and select the completion from the list.  You are welcome
to improve this as well.

>> Actually for 'C-x b' I'd prefer to sort buffers by the order of 
>> (buffer-list),
>> not by the order buffers occur in the minibuffer history (that I'd like
>> to use for everything else).
>
> Reasonable.  I suggest that this should be achieved by adding a
> display-sort-function, though.  (And... actually, that
> display-sort-function could maybe just be identity, since the
> completions are generated from buffer-list so they are in that order
> anyway?)

Actually there is already a nil value in completions-sort with the tag
"No sorting".  This works nicely for 'C-x b'.  The remaining need is
to be able to set it only for 'C-x b', not for other completion types.