Pop up menu for completion

Pop up menu for completion

[Olivier Ramare]

Hi all,

  Here is what I'm looking for:
  When writing Emacs Lisp code for programming languages (and I have
pari/gp and
mupad in mind), completion is of course an important issue. Good tools
are
already available, and my only complaint is with regard to the display,
that
could be more "X" to my feeling.
  An example: you seek completion of "al" and possible completions are
   "alone" "alight" and "aligned".
I would like a pop-up window to display these three choices (like
x-popup-menu).
*Then* if the user enters "o" the word "alone" should be send back (and
inserted
in the buffer, but that's the job of the script using it). If the user
enters "i",
the selection menu should shrink to "alight" and "aligned". Usual menu
selection
(mouse clicking) should of course work.
The only difference with x-pop-up-menu is that a character should be a
acceptable
entry (I mean some characters should, essentially the ones with
char-syntax
"word-constituent" and "symbol-constituent", well a customizable list
would be perfect)
and if x-popup-menu were to send back this character, writing the
appropriate script
would be most easy.
  Is there a way to recover this character ? I found none.
  To modify x-popup-menu is a bit tricky since a third argument should
be given,
namely the beginning of the string (here "al"), the enter "i" would
change the output
of x-popup-menu into the list of all entries in the menu starting with
"ali". But I fear
backward compatibility if a list is issued when only strings were
expected.
Maybe a single string could be send back and a flag set to indicate
whether it is
exact selection (via mouse click) or deduced one (via character).
  If you know a way of working around that, that would be of help, I'm
not so
happy with the splitting-of-windows stuff.
  Many thanks in advance,
                           Olivier

Re: Pop up menu for completion

[Kai Großjohann]

First of all, the Gnus mailing list might be the wrong place to
discuss general Emacs programming issues.

And secondly, I strongly suggest to use the built-in completion
facilities.  People have begun to use them (with `C-x C-f' for
example) right after starting with Emacs, so it's likely that they
know how to use them.

And maybe some day there will be a prettier completion function for
Emacs running under X11, and then every command that wants completion
can benefit from it.

Maybe you even want to work on this yourself?

kai
-- 
Be indiscrete.  Do it continuously.