Subject: Re: bug#4176: Acknowledgement (23.1; partial completions)

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:57:21 -0400

> After a quick look, I tried to redefine `minibuffer-complete' and just
> comment out the second (goto-char (field-end)).  This seems to work
> wrt wrongly moving the cursor to the end which seems to resolve both
[...]
> 1. Since this code was put there explicitly, there must be some issue
>    I don't see in removing it.

I don't have time to dig into this right now, but the cursor placement
is fairly tricky indeed, and there are often different valid choices
depending on your particular preferences.

The rule I tried to follow (in the partia-completion code) is that the
cursor should be placed to the rightmost position that still offers ways
to persue completion.  In your `select-window' example, it seems that
the behavior doesn't follow this rule, so it might indeed be
a plain bug.

> 2. Even after the quick code browse I have no idea what wonderful
>    features I'm losing by removing `basic' and `emacs22' from
>    `completion-styles'.  I would be happy if someone can enlighten me.

You lose the fact that the default Emacs-23 completion is a compromise
between the non-partial-completion and the partial-completion behavior.
If you used partial-completion and liked it, you probably want to do
(setq completion-styles '(partial-completion)) like you did.
But remember that enabling partial-completion by default in Emacs-23
didn't get accepted without a fight.

        Stefan