Subject: bug#65459: completing-read INITIAL-VALUE unaware of COLLECTION and REQUIRE-MATCH

From: Heime <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2023 22:04:06 +0000

The completing-read function in Emacs allows you to create a simple 
interactive prompt where the user can type to complete a string based
on a given collection.  REQUIRE-MATCH determines whether the input 
must match an item in the collection.

I find the design of completing-read as half-baked because INITIAL-VALUE 
always works as an independent entity, always unaware of COLLECTION and 
REQUIRE-MATCH

Thus, there exists no capabilities for possible interactions that could 
influence how the completion works.

For instance, suppose you want INITIAL-INPUT to be takes from collection,
and then have cycling start from a certain element after INITIAL-INPUT
is displayed.  You can't.  The only thing you can do is select an option
by automatically completing as much as possible.  

As for the cycling part, no proper functionality has been introduced.  INITIAL-INPUT
is there just to insert something to the minibuffer without any regard to possible 
restriction that one might want imposed on it and what gets displayed after INITIAL-VALUE.