Subject: bug#53935: 27.2; [PATCH] ecomplete.el: Auto-select when there is only a single option

From: Phil Sainty <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2022 23:27:31 +1300

On 2022-02-12 19:49, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Ah, I see.  Well, that's a lot better.  But...  it seems like a lot
> of stuff to just not have to hit RET when choosing an email address.

I thought that it was a small amount of stuff to prevent a noticeable
irritation.

I can see that you don't find the current behaviour to be irritating,
but "why can't I complete a singlular match with a single command?"
was one of my first questions upon trying ecomplete, so I'd be awfully
surprised if I was alone in that.

> And it makes the action of `M-n' less predicable -- sometimes it'll
> choose a name, and sometimes not.

I feel this is mitigated by the fact that the user sees in advance
what it's going to do (based on whether there's one match, or more
than one match, displayed in the echo area at the time).

> So I'm still not sure whether this makes sense for Emacs.

Having it as a user option is appropriate then, I think.  I'm in
favour of enabling the patched behaviour by default, but I don't mind
if it's opt-in.

I probably didn't pick a good name for the option, though.  In
hindsight something like `ecomplete-display-matches-auto-choose' is
probably better.  Or `ecomplete-display-matches-choose-dwim', given
that it's a DWIM-ish behaviour?

-Phil