cape VS marginalia

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.

At least for Elisp source block one can use font locking to create a custom Capf. Add cape-elisp-block from my Cape package to completion-at-point-functions. Even if you don't want to use Cape you could just copy it to your config. It is a short function.

You can use cape-history from my Cape package. This is similar to consult-history only utilizing completion-in-region instead of completing-read.

Haven't tried configuring it accordingly, but here's the docs: https://github.com/minad/cape

corfu is blazingly fast. Orderless is as well. What is not always blazingly fast is your completion providing backend. You didn't mention where your slow completions are coming from. An LSP server? Dabbrev? Maybe a remote machine? Have you combined results from various backends (e.g. using cape?). Some completions backends are unavoidably slow, others are just not well optimized.

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

Some time I'll add a mixin for Cape which would make the completion stuff really nice.

If you're set on using the completion system (M-TAB) for this, you could install Cape and use the cape-abbrev command to complete your abbrevs.

Oh, of course your efforts are valuable. I didn't mean to sound discouraging in any way. The point made by /u/xenodium is good - if you have a special candidate source with special behavior, it makes sense to provide a separate lightweight Capf. In contrast, using Tempel for this purpose doesn't make much use of the actual template functionality. Tempel is only a good fit for Org blocks if you use it already anyway, as I do. There is also value in having reference Capfs around, which will be helpful when developers create their own new completion functions. This was also the intention when I created my Cape package, which comes with many simple Capfs. It is always interesting to see what other Emacs users come up with. I am thankful for such efforts - it is inspiring!

Check out marginalia[1]. Whenever you press M-x, it will pop up a buffer showing all the commands (with most recent ones on top) along with their keybindings and a brief description of what they do.

Embark[2] is also cool. It will show all the possible commands relevant to where the cursor is at that moment. I bind it to C-c a.

[1] https://github.com/minad/marginalia

Then there is Marginalia which is IMO essential

marginalia. Informative annotations for minibuffer completion candidates, co-written with u/minad-emacs.

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.

marginalia for extra info in the minibuffer

There seems to be some problem with straight not correctly installing or updating compat. See these issues on Marginalia and Embark where straight seems to not install Compat.

Note that I contribute to Emacs core itself from time to time but the process is discussion-heavy and thus time consuming. If you are familiar with the completing-read API, you may know the annotation-function of completion tables. The name already tells that this function just adds annotations to the completion candidates. The Marginalia package (written by /u/oantolin and me) provides such annotations. A similar function is the group-function, which groups candidates in subsets and adds titles above the subsets. I wrote the patch which added this feature to Emacs. It is now supported by default completion, Icomplete, Vertico and maybe other UIs. The initial implementation was done in the earlier Selectrum package, and a little later in Vertico.

At the end of the year, I am happy to announce the stable Vertico 1.0 and Marginalia 1.0 releases. Vertico is a minimalist, yet flexible and responsive vertical completion UI. Marginalia provides helpful annotations for many completion contexts. Both packages have been solid for a while but I rather let things mature slowly. These releases finally put the stamp "stable" on these two packages. I expect the other members of the package suite to follow soon after. Both packages have been updated recently to support the newest Emacs 29 features. They are compatible with Emacs 27, 28 and the upcoming 29.

I) I started out trying to implement this using marginalia, like the consult commands, but quickly concluded that this wasn't the way to go here... please correct me if I'm wrong and there is more from these packages I could make use of. I also try to make use of as much of the citar codebase as possible, but have found it difficult so far: a lot seems too specific for bibliographic entries.

I can't find anything that seems to discuss them in detail, but Marginalia is a package that applies them widely in completion. And here is a simple example for customized file completion.