company-box VS company-mode

An advanced alternative to built-in tooltip and echo frontends is company-box. It displays candidates and docs for current candidate in popups.

For elisp it works out of the box and displays the first line of the helpbuffer in the echo area. If you add company-box or company-quickhelp you'll get the description text next to completion candidates.

You can either fix you font, or use another frontend that supports variable pitched fonts like company-box or company-posframe

Is this any different from company-box?

I'm curious to know what `company` does differently here than `corfu`. As a longtime user I couldn't be happier.

https://company-mode.github.io/

they wrote the first word and auto-completed the rest

For me, it's http://company-mode.github.io and maybe a touch of all-the-icons..

I'm not sure if I did anything special to enable it, but I'm pretty sure company-mode does this

When I started using Emacs I was following the setup outlined by System Crafters, which I still think is a really good introduction. But, over the last few months I've started to replace packages with more "minimalist" or "stripped down" packages. I've switched from Ivy and Counsel to Vertico and Consult, and recently I switched from company to corfu for auto-completion.

As for the Emacs configuration, you should only need a few lines of code, in order to get them up and running, if you are planning to keep your setup as close to vanilla as possible. If you are interested, you could additionally install a completion framework like company-mode to help you out.

As for auto-completion, there's a few different variants that people use. Auto-complete being one of them, but an alternative you might want to try is http://company-mode.github.io/

For the company-mode see Frontends.

Company is a classic, though corfu and cape, also by Daniel Mendler is really excellent.