straight.el VS company-mode

Very dated and next to useless on large complex CPP codebases. Use a language server. I recommend the straight package manager. https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el

Have you tried using straight.el or the heir-apparent Elpaca? These package managers will check out the git repo of said packages, and you can easily fork them with magit and forge. That's that I do to contribute to packages.

Thank you for your time addressing all those issues and sorry if questions were misinformed - I found your advices invaluable to understand design goals of package managers in emacs.

I used straight.el, now I use Elpaca.

Doom Emacs is not a package manager. It has a package manager, which is based on Straight.el.

I have been crafting my emacs config for about 10 years. I started with vanilla and intentionally stayed away from frameworks. About two years ago I declared config bankruptcy and went down for a rewrite using use-package and straight.

First install straight.el (https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el)

ref: https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

If you use straight and override package, you'll get a lot of your desired functionality for free. Straight's docs are excellent. I started banging away on my own setup from scratch, and while not perfect, it does what I want and the total startup time is about 1.5 seconds without doing anything to try to optimize it. If you want to see it, check it out here. Like I said, there is lots of room for improvement, but it does work for me.

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.