outli VS company-mode

I had the same experience as you, and wanted nice automated headings, so I wrote outli. It's mostly a thin wrapper around outline-minor-mode, and is much simpler that outshine, dropping many vestigial features, and adding org quick-keys at heading positions.

I actually use my simple outli package for this, with folding, narrowing to sub-tree and org-style quick-key navigation. It does help a lot with a single large file.

It may also be worth taking a look at outli which provides org-mode-like navigation and structure editing via your comments.

I actually wrote a substitute for a pretty large and largely unmaintained package (outshine) called outli; it relies heavily on outline-mode and not much else.

This is what outline-mode is designed for. If you always want the same style of heading in various modes, and you want your headlines to have depth for hierarchical folding (e.g. // top level, /// next lower level, etc.), you might check out my little mode outli.

outli is a simple outliner mode which makes it easy to outline, fold, navigate, and restructure your code, documents, or other buffers. It offers nice headline styling, org-like speed-keys, imenu support, and more.

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.