Re: pabbrev.el

[Toby Cubitt]

William Xu wrote:
> Toby Cubitt <address@hidden> writes:
>
> completion-UI is a nice idea.
>
> > The Emacs Wiki contains code snippets that provide the simple glue
> > between completion-UI and a number of completion-finding mechanisms (so
> > far: dabbrevs, etags, and predictive-mode).
>
> I just tried dabbrev wrapper from the wiki, turn on
> auto-completion-mode. It could display candicates in the minibuffer, and
> after sometime show a popup menu. However, this process takes ten or so
> seconds, so barely usable..

Auto-completion-mode is only useful when the function finding the 
completions can return results within a few tenths of a second (i.e. 
faster than your typing speed). Dabbrev was never designed to be that 
fast. You can make things more workable by setting an 
auto-completion-delay, but really you either need to use a completion 
function that was designed for that kind of speed, or switch off 
auto-completion-mode and stick to completion on demand (i.e. hitting a 
key when you want to bring up completions). There's a good reason why 
that's the default setting in completion-UI...

(The completion tool-tip pops up after a 3 second delay by default, but 
you can of course customize this.)

The only completion functions I'm aware of that were designed to be fast 
enough are those in the predictive-mode and pabbrev packages. Perhaps 
this is because auto-completion makes most sense when the completion is 
predictive.

If you want to get a taste of what auto-completion-mode is like when 
you're a good completion function, you could try installing my 
predictive package, since the completion-UI "glue" is already in place 
and it enables auto-completion-mode by default. If you like it, but 
would prefer to use pabbrev, then you could write the necessary pabbrev 
wrapper function I mentioned previously. (Pabbrev and predictive-mode 
work rather differently and serve different audiences - pabbrev is a 
predictive version of dabbrev, in that it gathers its completions from 
the buffer. Predictive-mode uses persistent dictionaries of completions, 
 which it "trains" and adds words to as you type. Although 
predictive-mode can be configured to simulate pabbrev, there's probably 
little point in doing so. You might as well use pabbrev!)


> I looked into my .emacs, i have only set
> `hippie-expand-try-functions-list'. Does this affect dabbrev wrapper ?
> And i'm using 23.0.50 built on 20071020.

Not unless this affects dabbrev itself.

Toby