Improving completion on mailboxes

[Anthony Mallet]

The completing-read on the list of available mailboxes in the minibuffer is weird:
 - on any invalid input, it will reset to the empty string what was already typed. It should keep the current input with the usual "no completions" message (allowing to easily correct the input if e.g. only the last char was wrong).
 - with a valid but not unique input, when hitting <tab>, it will still display the whole mailbox list instead of just the valid matches, preventing to easily spot the available mailboxes with the current prefix typed so far.

In case you also agree with the above remarks, I attach a patch against vm-imap.el rev 1205 (current rev) that implements this. Note that the patch was tested against emacs-23.2, and uses 'string-prefix-p which may not be available on earlier emacs. 'string-prefix-p is easily implemented with 'compare-strings, though.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Thanks for this Anthony. My recollection is that I left the autocompletion
stuff half-finished because there were some irritation or other with the
Elisp primitives. I will take a look again.

Cheers,
Uday

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

The patch applied in revision 1208. But strangely, this fix breaks the compleition for <SPC>. Needs to be looked at.

[Anthony Mallet (anthony-mallet)]

Here is a new patch against 1208 that restore SPC completion.

All what it does is to remove a trailing " " from the current completion string, and some emacs magic does the rest. I'm actually not sure why it works ... (and I think it worked by "accident" before, the (string= " " folder) test was actually never true).

Anyway ... :)

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Committed the second patch in revision 1229.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

See Bug 283761 for a related problem.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Grrr. That should have been Bug 783761.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Try again. It is bug 783671.