EmacsWiki: Comments on IcompleteMode

This page is out of date for icomplete in 24.4+. Should it be removed to avoid giving inaccurate info?

– JeremyMoore 2016-10-08 19:17 UTC

What’s out-of-date about it? I use Emacs 24.5 daily with Icomplete mode (and Emacs 25.1, until it crashes). AFAICT, everything written on this page is still relevant. Be specific about what you think needs updating.

– DrewAdams 2016-10-08 21:21 UTC

Sorry, that wasn’t very helpful of me.

A lot of this page seems to date back to the days when icomplete showed a list of possible completions but provided no way to interact with that list. There’s very little here about the versions which support cycling and completion with ‘C-j’. I gather from the mailing list archives that it should be usable as an iswitchb replacement, so I came here hoping for some tips on making it more iswitchb-like. However, at the moment there’s no hint that icomplete even applies to buffer- and file-name completion.

Looking at the page again, I would rather say it’s out of date due to being incomplete instead of inaccurate. I do question these bits though:

“Icomplete mode provides an incremental MiniBuffer Completion preview.” - I think that’s a good description of the original behaviour, but ‘preview’ doesn’t really cover it any more.
“so you can see how to complete a command” - It’s gotten more generic than that.
“(icomplete-mode 99)” - Who knows how long ago that was necessary, it just uses define-minor-mode now.
“does not actually perform any completion of your input” - I would argue that going `C-. C-. C-. C-j’ is performing completion.
“The default key bindings for cycling take away useful minibuffer keys”. Is that still a concern now that the default bindings are `C-.’ and `C-,’?

I’ll aim to come back in a while to fill some content in, but I haven’t yet figured out a sane way to use the mode.

– JeremyMoore 2016-10-20 13:54 UTC

1. I added mention of selecting completion candidates. Feel free to add more description of Icomplete mode.

2. `(icomplete-mode 99)’ is how to turn it on. That’s what ‘define-minor-mode’ provides. I changed 99 to 1, so as not to suggest that 99 is special - but neither is 1.

3. Yes, it is unfortunate (IMHO) that `C-.’ and `C-,’ are used by Icomplete mode. But I would probably say the same thing about any keys taken by it. [Icomplete+] fixes that, as mentioned, by providing cycling as a separate mode.

4. In general, adding candidate selection/cycling to Icomplete mode makes it a poor-man’s Ido. (IMHO, Icomplete is most useful as a preview, not as a means of choosing a candidate.)

5. IswitchB still works fine, BTW.

– DrewAdams 2016-10-20 14:41 UTC