Emacs Reboot #7: Ido

21 comments

  1. Good stuff, Avdi. But you forgot one of the most useful features of ido: matching anywhere in a pathname. Very useful e.g in the db/migrations directory, where you can just type the name, ignoring the leading timestamps, and Emacs finds your stuff 🙂

  2. // and /~/ work in normal find-file as well. And hitting ctrl-f during Ido lookup reverts back to the normal find-file/find-buffer which I find I need occasionally (and I might not be able to use Ido if it wasn’t possible, so feels like it’s worth highlighting.)

    Two things I wish I could fix (in case anyone knows):

    I’d kinda like to match an entire path, without regard for directory levels, i.e., without having to hit return to enter a directory. Maybe too hard.

    Sometimes when I’m typing a file name, the current selected file changes even if the new characters match the current filename.

    I presume that second one is because Ido assumes if the right file is selected and I’m still typing, I must want a different file. But I often type ahead and so this ends up wrong. That’s basically the same problem with directory selection. Anything that requires I know what is currently matched before I type another character creates a glitch for me.

    Thanks for the info. I gotta go watch the rest now. (And buy the book.)

  3. Completely orthogonal: in post.rb, you have code which goes like ‘hide_singletons [constants]’ and it is “correctly” indented (as in – how I’d do it by hand. If I use ruby-mode’s indent (C-M-) it will align the constants under ‘hide_singletons’ instead of with the start of the previous line. Wrapping the method in parens fixes this behavior but its not the community standard so it’s not a sustainable solution. I couldn’t find anything obvious to customize here. Any tips?

    1. Just like MINASWAN, MUESWUE (matz uses emacs so we use emacs). Matz is the author of ruby-mode.el so obviously the indentation is correct. 😛

  4. One great shortcut I found on the web, in addition to typing characters to fuzzy (flex) match filter, C-SPC “commit” the filter and reduce the number of displayed candidates. Really neat when digging for common names/prefixes since fuzzy match isnt fast on large lists.

  5. I’ve tried ido a couple times now and really disliked the non-emacsy UI choices that they made. I’m trying it again just for a change and at least I found out that you can stick the output heigh to a single line. Some of the key bindings are just so unintuitive (ok… to a long-time emacs user) that I may have to disable it soon.

    I’d REALLY like to have a generic fuzzy-match function available for a completion function replacement.

        • I almost never use C-x C-d, instead using regular find-file and then hitting return on a directory.
        • Removing M-r, searching previously visited files in my file history.
        • DEL for going up a directory actually drives me a bit nuts… I’m trying tho.
        • Fucking with my C-a, C-e, M-f, M-b. ARGH! Don’t mess with global emacs editing defaults!

        Looking at what I’ve tweaked so far (god I love M-x customize-unsaved!), turning off auto-merge-directories has helped my sanity, as has max-window-height and enable-dot-prefix.

        1. I have similar issues with ido – never understood it’s use-case frankly, it’s not like TAB doesn’t give you everything already.

          1. I shiver at the thought of being stuck with only vanilla tab-completion in Emacs. I rather like not having to remember what number filenames in places like /etc/init.d begin with. I can just type in the word part of the name and find what I’m looking for easily.

          2. Not sure how long ago you were using tab completion, but vanilla (a la plain old Bash style) isn’t really an accurate description, /e/i./TAB is going to list everything in /etc/init.d/ … The tab matching is quite similar to zsh, although it doesn’t do zsh’s “//name TAB” (you could wildcard it though) which looks in all folders 2 levels deep, although you pay for that waiting for the search. If ido finds a file anywhere without path specs, and does it quick, I’ve missed an important feature… Did I? … Enhanced flex/fuzzy matching would be cool, but the compulsory nature of ido’s defaults are in my way.

          3. In a large directory, tab-completing to see a file list is damn near useless. Not to mention I don’t want to see a listing; I just want to go to the file I’m thinking of. With ido if there is a file called “20-fooble” in a directory, I can just start typing “f-o-o…” and ido will narrow down to the “20-fooble “file.

            It will also do the kind of completion you’re talking about much more interactively. No guesswork about how many letters I need for
            an unambiguous match because I can watch it as it narrows.

          4. In this use case, I can see why you’d want ido, the problem is all the other assumptions IDO places in my way. As I say, if it could be stripped down to it’s flex/fuzzy matching component I wouldn’t be averse to using it at all. While it may be less natural for you, 2-fTAB gets me 20-fooble fast enough. You’d be in equal shtoock if you had 20-fooble, 21-fooble, 22-fooble, … 99-fooble, right? if I knew that my filename was fooble but couldn’t remember the number prefix I could also wildcard my way to it (*foTAB) which is acceptable to me because it follows patterns which I’ve used for 25+ years.

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