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Comment by globular-toast | Hacker News Reader

The author might want to check out the orderless completion style which goes even further and matches the groups in any order, so in the example the string "emacs articles" would also match (as well as "em art" etc.)

I used Emacs full time for more than a decade without fully understanding completion and that meant I wasn't able to tweak it to my liking. Things would break and I didn't understand why. Although I think company is probably the most polished and best in-buffer completion UI there is, using modular components like eglot, orderless and corfu has helped me to understand the various aspects of completion and get it all working how I want it.

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I am a helm user. Am I missing out too much by not checking out Vertico, Embark, Corfu and friends?

You're not missing out feature-wise, no. Helm is the original kitchen sink power tool on this front. The Vertico-stack is interesting for different reasons, like simplicity of implementation.

I have tried various things for completion, etc over the years, and found Helm just too 'deep' of a topic to dig into... but vertico is the first time any of these things just 'clicked' and it's improved my experience of emacs 10-fold.

For me, helm kinda clicked after a careful reading of its author's blogpost at https://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html

Somehow, I feel like, if I were to configure vertico etc to my liking, I might just end up recreating a ductaped version of helm.

You just unlocked a memory of when I found Helm intimidating just because some of its behavior surprised me on my initial tryouts. After reading the manual, it was actually much simpler than it had seemed.

IIRC helm doesn't provide complete-at-point so Corfu would be in a different category. Otherwise no, helm is really featureful and works pretty nice out-of-the-box, those packages are far more lean and probably easier to hack on.

My bad, so Corfu is in the category of Company mode.

To be fair to your decade comment, a lot changed in how things were done in that time period.

It is also surprising how far dabbrev-expand can get you in most code bases.

How long did it take to "get it all working"?

Professor Mike says that copy/paste of the example config from their respective readmes is all it takes. See:-

https://youtu.be/5ffb2at2d7w

I think the most difficult thing was in understanding the roles the various components have. "Completion" means something in Emacs that might not mean what you expect it to mean (but you probably expect that from Emacs anyway). Many tools/packages cover more than one part of the overall solution. Maybe I should write something up to demystify it for others wanting to go down the same path. In the end it took me an evening or two to get it all working.

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