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Asked: 2026-05-24T23:03:17+00:00

I am writing a function that uses the minibuffer and requires a somewhat different

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I am writing a function that uses the minibuffer and requires a somewhat different style of completion that might require deleting some characters. For example:

ar<tab> -> artist:
artist:ba<tab> -> artist:'Johann Sebastian Bach' 
artist:'Johann Sebastian Bach'<tab> -> artist:'Bela Bartók'
artist:'Bela Bartók' and album:<tab> 
etc...

I’ve already written the completion function, that generates a list of possible strings for the current input, yet I cannot use it with completing-read and completion-table-dynamic, because only the alternatives that do not require deletion are displayed. In this case, only the first step, from ar to artist.

To do the job, I’m considering using the lower-level (read-from-minibuffer) with a custom keymap to do the completion and display the alternatives. Is there a simpler solution? If not, which functions are there to handle displayed and cycling through the Completions buffer?

Thanks!

EDIT: In the end, I rolled my own. Here is the code, if anybody’s interested.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Yes, Icicles should give you what you want, IIUC.

    I’m not sure how you’re handling things like ‘artist’ and ‘album’, but there are a few ways Icicles could help.

    1. You can match parts of a completion candidate in any order. So if ‘foo’ and ‘bar’ are parts of the same candidate, then you can match any candidates that have both, in either order. This is “progressive completion”: you can keep adding patterns to narrow the choices. Patterns are ANDed. You can also subtract candidates that match a pattern.

    2. You can have candidates that are “multi-completions”. These are composed of parts, separated by a configurable string. You can match against any or all parts. So, for example, a candidate might be an album name plus artist names.

    3. If you also use Bookmark+ then you can tag files, a la delicious.com tagging. You need not visit files to tag them. Tags are generally strings (including newlines if you want), but they can also have associated Lisp values. Here, you might have a file for each album and tag albums with descriptions and various artists. Then you can complete to find a given album file by matching parts of its name and/or artists.

    For all Icicles completion, you can use progressive completion and complementing (#1). For each part of a progression you can use substring or regexp matching (or even fuzzy matching of various sorts).

    Some links that might help:

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