A Vompeccc Case Study: Spotify as Pure ICR in Emacs

17 points by chiply 4 days ago|9 comments

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chiply 4 days ago

"This is the third post in a series on Emacs completion. The first post argued that Incremental Completing Read (ICR) is not merely a UI convenience but a structural property of an interface, and that Emacs is one of the few environments where completion is exposed as a programmable substrate rather than a sealed UI. The second post broke the substrate into eight packages (collectively VOMPECCC), each solving one of the six orthogonal concerns of a complete completion system.

In this post, I show, concretely, what it looks like when you build with VOMPECCC, by walking through the code of spot, a Spotify client I implemented as a pure ICR application in Emacs."

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fenazego 2 days ago

I missed your original VOMPECCC submission. Thanks for the write-up.

Although I've been a daily Emacs user for +25 years, I've only occasionally invested time in tweaking ICR (messing with the basic editor stuff you use hundreds of times a day can really get in the way of getting things done), and the sheer number of packages and sub-packages in the ICR space meant I only had a hazy idea of how they all related and (are they complementary, alternatives, successors?). Your VOMPECCC blogpost does a terrific job clarifying that!

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chiply 2 days ago

Emacs for 25+ years is admirable! Question for you - did you ever use Icicles? I'm going to add that to the history section in the previous post that discussed the history of completion in Emacs and how we got to VOMPECCC.

The author of Embark (the E in VOMPECCC) reached out yesterday mentioning that Icicles would be a good addition, and like me, he and his fellow VOMPECCC package authors hadn't used it before. I think we all started using emacs when helm was already an option. I know Icicles was more popular years ago pre-helm and pre-ivy, and it would be great to hear a little blurb about your experience with it if you ever used it!

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fenazego 2 days ago

I haven't used icicles either. For most of the time I used ido, and at some point I switched to ivy.

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mplanchard 3 days ago

I really love this content, and the presentation, but I will just say that a “go back” button when following a footnote would be a really welcome addition

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chiply 3 days ago

=) you're a legend --- I just added the go back button this morning and will deploy tonight. In the short term, if you click the number in the footnote it will take you back. Thats what I'm button-izing.

This bad experience is an artifact of switching from the original experience (with autosyncing Footnotes, plus other goodies, in the sidelines) to this minimal one. If you want the chaos with all the sideline components, you can toggle them in the Reading Controls menu in the top right hand side of the article page.

Thank you for reading!

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mplanchard 2 days ago

Thanks for writing! I normally wouldn’t even comment on a small thing like that, but with the length of the articles it was tough to go back and forth. Clicking the number in the footnote works great. I swear I tried that before, but maybe just didn’t hit it quite right

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ThePowerOfFuet 2 days ago

I can't even scroll without enabling JavaScript.

I guess I won't read it then.

That said, Emacs is truly a very capable OS. If only it shipped with a good text editor...

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chiply 23 hours ago

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I want to support the no JS browsers. I'll try to fix this sometime today.