corfu VS dirvish

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A substantial section of the community is using corfu instead of company, but I wouldn't say company is out of date by any means.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

Finally, there is an awesome (in my opinion) add-on for dired called dirvish - makes dired more 'ranger' like if you're familiar with that. I absolutely love this package and its made dired's awesomeness even more awesome.

why are the separations of my windows so ugly? I get a wide grey divider, when using dirvish, it is even worse (2 separators!!!)

Also dirvish-side

I'm not sure if it's exactly what you want, but to me Dirvish is the best these days. It builds upon dired in a beautiful way

In addition to other cool things dirvish does this.

That said https://github.com/alexluigit/dirvish is amazing on one of my computers and broken on the other so if you could fix that and let me know please do.

Thanks for the reply, I hadn't seen those last two posts which are nice. Lately I've been using Dirvish for those type of operations. But this isn't exactly what I was looking for. I may not have been totally clear.

The file manager Dirvish. You know how the veterans say that Dired is the best file manager? Well, with dirvish even mere mortals can agree. It has panes, a pretty UI, and even pdf preview through pdf-tools.