Re: Any infrastructure to select one of a few options in Emacs core?

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2016-05-09, at 18:37, Kaushal Modi <kaushal.modi@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 11:41 AM Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> wrote:
>
>> I'd like to have (kind of) a menu, perhaps in a temporary buffer,
>> displaying a list of options and giving a way to select one of them.
>> Like, say clocking into one of recently clocked tasks in Org, or the
>> main manu in mu4e, or the possible corrections in ispell etc.  It seems
>> that a lot of packages use their own mechanism to do something like
>> that; now that I think of it, I guess it would be nice to have
>> a "canonical" way.  One advantage would be that by customizing this
>> "default" way, the user could define his/her preferred way of showing
>> the menu/selecting the option for _all_ applications using it.
>>
>> WDYT?  Is there anything like that in Emacs?
>
>
> I haven't used it directly. But someone please correct me if I am wrong;
> doesn't the inbuilt completing-read already do this?
>
> Packages like ivy.el have ivy-completing-read which conforms to the default
> completing-read, and can be easily used to enhance that.

Yes and no.  I thought about it, and rejected the idea: I want all the
options to be visible without pressing TAB.  Also, each option might
need more than one line (and the number of lines may vary between
options), so I don't like the idea of using minibuffer at all.

Thanks anyway,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University