corfu VS hydra

You could try corfu. It has auto-completion disabled by default and works most places with M-Tab. Or you could set a longish corfu-auto-delay (0.75s say), and let auto popup only when you stop to ponder a while.

Corfu supports this. Or at least it allows you to move completions to the mini buffer which I find quiet useful.

A substantial section of the community is using corfu instead of company, but I wouldn't say company is out of date by any means. In emacs 29 eglot will be a built in, which might act as a replacement for lsp-mode depending on what functionality you need.

Wow, interesting that my response is getting down voted. It seems not enough that I give away my work for free. Nevertheless I appreciate support from the community, as other Emacs package developers. The support is actually helpful. To clarify, publishing my configuration would translate into quite a bit of work, requiring separation of private and public bits.

I am currently using evil and corfu, but I want to configure such that pressing a single escape will invoke corfu-quit when its UI is active (because pressing "C-g" is harder).

A few days ago I found an unexplained slowness when using Corfu on Emacs 29 with pgtk. I stripped my configuration to basically just Corfu, and still had a noticeable delay. Maybe it is related to your problem. https://github.com/minad/corfu/issues/307

The most straight forward solution is probably the package company-math. (that's what I use but with corfu and cape)

See here: https://github.com/minad/corfu/issues/231

You can also use Hydra for Emacs.[1] Once I discovered how to configure Hydra, I made it a habit to make one for every new major mode I need to use.

[1] https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra

Have you considered a hydra?

An Emacs specific example: I'm working on a few go projects at the moment and go requires recompilation after changes. Step one was finding auto-recompilers for my projects (I'm using both air and reflex in various projects). Step two was realizing that I spent a lot of time switching to the buffer where the output is printed, so I wrote a little hydra menu to make that easier. Then I found myself having to restart those processes each time I restarted Emacs, so I went digging and found detached to manage the processes. Then I got tired of having to hunt for where the detached output was displayed in my frame so dug into sidebars to manage the windows more effectively.

I think the goal of the hydra package is to provide such functionality.

I would I also encourage anyone who does not want to use modal editing to look into repeat-mode, hydras, and key-chord.

The C-c prefix is designed for you, the user, to use for your nefarious deeds. Some things that may help with both binding and knowing what key does what would be a menu such as hydras or transient menus (which apparently are part of Emacs now so that's new).

For the very same reason, I started to use hydras: https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra - see my config at https://github.com/novoid/dot-emacs/blob/master/config.org

Hydra lets you define mini-modes with limited scope.

general.el also works well with hydra.el. Here's my hydra for window operations - it activates when I press ,w: