unpackaged.el VS vertico

The question is almost like asking a fish to describe water. It's the sudden lack of it that produces a really clear example. :)

Anyway, here's a random example that comes to mind: I have some sexps in a Lisp file and I want to sort them alphabetically. Each sexp (usually a top-level form, but not necessarily) usually spans multiple lines, so line-sorting won't do it. Since they may be top-level forms, there may be comments between them that would lose their context if their position relative to sexps were lost, so comments need to "stick to" sexps they're above.

How would you solve this in a random text editor?

In Emacs, I would develop a command that does what I need. At each stage of the development process, I evaluate the command's definition, and it's instantly available to be used and tested. I could even test the function on its own definition, if I wanted to be silly (undoing the sorting after testing, of course).

When I'm done, I save the command definition to my configuration, and it's now a permanent tool in my toolbox. I didn't have to recompile the editor and start a new process, nor did I have to submit a patch to an upstream and ask for it to be merged. Similarly to a carpenter (forgive me if it sounds silly), my editor is my workbench, and as wood is malleable, so is my editor.

So, here's the command I came up with (maybe not the prettiest implementation, but maybe not the worst): https://github.com/alphapapa/unpackaged.el#sort-sexps And using Emacs and Org mode, I publish it into this "unpackaged" package, which I then install into my configuration as a package, and other users can then easily install it into theirs, too.

I don't know of any other editor that can do all of this, certainly not so easily.

Here's the code in my Emacs config. I'll probably add these functions to unpackaged.el (the Org sorting function there is more primitive than these).

Sorting. This is handled within Org, see org-sort. However, you may find this function helpful for sorting recursively and with multiple methods (e.g. first by priority, then alphabetically): https://github.com/alphapapa/unpackaged.el#sort-tree-by-multiple-methods-at-once

The customize buffers can be used with the keyboard. You can tab between fields, and C-c C-c to set values. See also https://github.com/alphapapa/unpackaged.el#set-value-of-customization-option-at-point

It would be great if you add your snippet to the Vertico wiki. Such tweaks can be quite instructive for others who want to achieve the same or similar effects for other completion commands.

If you want completion to be sorted by your "most recent" I suggest you have a look at completion libraries. One example is vertico; when you enable savehist mode, the variable magit-revision-history, containing the branches you visited is persisted between sessions and vertico use that offer completions by most-recently-used, by default.

I think vertico is best alternative recently, really fast on Linux, macOS and Windows.

(use-package modus-themes :vc (:url "https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes" :branch "main")) (use-package vertico :vc (:url "https://github.com/minad/vertico" :rev :newest :lisp-dir "extensions/"))

An example relevant to your list would be some changes many people are taking with their completion framework - using package that leverage core emacs functionality rather than replacing it with a complete package that 'overrides' it. Consult, vertico, orderless and associate packages come to mind here. If you do a bit of a search you'll find plenty of info. Here is a video from Prot on the subject, but there are many others as well. I think Prot actually went on to write his own completion system to overlay native emacs functionality as well.

Next you "only" have to remember (elisp) function names. "Completion UIs" like ivy/counsel, icomplete, helm or vertico/consult, give you a nice auto completion list on M-x (choose the one of them, you like the most). Some of those Completion UIs will display existing keybindings and a short documentation for commands, near the auto complete candidates. So you will start to remember more keybindings without "learning sessions", just because invoking functions via keybindings is much faster (more convenient).

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 thought that lsp and rtags were different tools to do different things. Regarding lsp, I configured lsp-mode in my init file indeed! Currently I'm using Vertico (plus recommended sub-packages at github repository) and lsp-mode.

Hey! There has already been a horizontico.el. ;)

FYI, selectrum is getting deprecated in favor of vertico. https://github.com/minad/vertico/issues/237