What You Can Learn From ido.el (Emacs vs. TextMate) [video] | Hacker News Reader

What You Can Learn From ido.el (Emacs vs. TextMate) [video]

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30 pointsd0mine11 comments

I was a little disappointed he never touched on the best use of fuzzy matching: function names. Lisp would probably look like APL or Perl if we actually had to type "with-open-file" instead of just "w o f TAB RET".

Interesting. I suppose we can, in part, blame Arc's brevity on the fact that Paul Graham uses vi:

http://paulgraham.com/pfaq.html

This just makes me feel like I really need to work on becoming a more advanced user of emacs. I don't utilize the built in power of emacs nearly enough.

I'm still not sold on ido... I'm trying it out again, but thus far there are enough annoyances that I don't think I can activate it full-time. I may, however, use their completing read function standalone tho for other things I do.

So far, I've found that autotest.el + file-cache + ffap + some advice for ffap (see my emacswiki page) does 80-90% of what I need on a daily basis.

Out of curiosity, what are the annoyances you have with it?

I'm in the same boat. And the number one annoyance is that it's not keystroke compatible. I have the standard editting keys in my fingers for loading files (C-x C-f C-a C-k pathprefix TAB path TAB etc..). That stuff breaks with ido and I get stalled and have to compose myself and figure out what I'm doing.

Wouldn't it have been possible to preserve both the classic editability of the path string and have fuzzy matching?

that is CERTAINLY some of it... wtf were they thinking when they decided to take the regular find-file TAB key and replace it with RET???

to answer the question above: it is VERY intrusive. I've finally set it up to only ever take 1 line only, but even then it is a huge departure from the norm. The key incompatibility is a huge issue. The fact that all my muscle memory (17 years) is dead using it.

I have this peculiar belief that C-x C-f RET should _always_ open the parent dir of the current buffer's file. ido threw that out the window. Now that will load the alphabetically first file in the dir. Lame.

There are others, but I don't remember them currently.

I tried ido a few times, but never really liked it. I felt like it was jumping ahead of me, often in directions I didn't want to go.

I like Icicles much better. It offers lots of features like ido, but I actually need to press a key before they happen.

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles

ido has advantage that it is included in Emacs22 (no third-party packages required)

As a counterpoint, I love ido, and it makes using the commandline so frustrating.

99% of the time it somehow seems to have read my mind, so I can tab my way to happiness.

Ah, Stuart showed us his typing abilities

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