Subject: RE: bug#9598: 24.0.50; completion goes too far

From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 18:53:26 -0700

>     IOW, let users choose at completion time which completion 
>     style(s) to use, on demand.  Each time they change methods
>     they can complete anew and find out whether there are
>     matches using that method.
> 
> This might be too complicated an interface to be good to use.
> But you could try implementing it and we could judge based
> on experience.

I did, years ago.  In Icicles you can do just that.
I suggested the approach here based on experience with it.

1. A user option lists the completion methods to use (i.e., to make available
for cycling, in the order specified).

2. During completion, `C-(' cycles to the next method.

A user can also do this specifically, for given commands.  That is, a given
command can have a list of completion methods associated with it.  When this is
the case, that command's list overrides the global list, for use by `C-('.  A
separate user option records these command-specific completion preferences.

Vanilla Emacs could do something similar, with little coding, IMO.  No, I'm not
going to do it.  This description should suffice, and the Icicles code is freely
available for reference, if anyone is really interested.  Anyway, I'm betting
that even _if_ Emacs Dev wanted to do something like this they would not want to
do it the same way.

[Actually, Icicles has two keys for completing (in different ways), and thus two
different lists of methods for cycling, one for each completion key.  `C-('
cycles among the methods associated with `TAB' completion.  `M-(' cycles among
the methods associated with `S-TAB' completion.]