Code Completion In Emacs - Everything You Need To Know

[@georgH]

Excellent summary! Installed corfu and cape a while ago but didn't stop on actually learning about them. I really like the current trend of using most of Emacs core directly, instead of packages reinventing the wheel all the time.

[@sethbrown1763]

Thank you for sharing this video! I learned a lot from it and will probably be coming back to it from time to time as it makes more sense to me over time. Excellent presentation!

[@yagosantanna8548]

Just migrated to corfu and cape. Thank you very much for this very comprehensive tutorial.

[@GavinFreeborn]

Glad I could help!

[@defnlife1683]

Awesome. I've been getting into emacs slowly thanks to your channel! :D

[@ozzy9846]

Great video! I'm currently in the process of switching over from company to corfu/cape. I love how you showed us your configuration for these packages as well as a brief explanation of what some of the config options do.

[@DanielMircea]

In company you can call control + s and search (filter) within the results which personally I like more than orderless.

[@DangerSepp]

Rly appreciate your summary! I didn't know about cape, and never tried corfu.

[@aiotmlwtf]

With Emacs 30 came =completion-preview=, a nice type ahead or inline preview function.

[@abarocio80]

Thanks, Gavin! This was really useful, specially with corfu and cape.

[@frankchen5728]

Thank you very much for the great video, Gavin! I followed the instructions to set up Corfu in my emacs. It works for Lisp but not Python. Is there any other extensions I need to install to make it work for Python?

[@nonefvnfvnjnjnjevjenjvonej3384]

its just so much setup... i used to love emacs... but sometimes i miss the "just works" of vscode and jetbrains ide's.

[@rlifts]

You should do a tempel video. Thanks for the 20 line config getting started with emacs, it became 10,000 lines lol. Several months ago I started on Emacs with your config. Thinking about moving to corfu, Daniel corfu/consult/vertico/tempel maintainer is a workhorse. Dmitry from company mode is super nice, he's helped me out a few times and implemented a feature I suggested in an old post.

[@MENTOKz]

great video gavin i will have to as this to my config thanks

[@marlisschneider4603]

I am enjoying very much your emac content :) So much to learn and adapt! Would you be willing to share your wallpaper (the one with the sea and lighthouse)? Obsessed with it since I saw it in your video on your emcacs workflow.

[@SimulatedWarfare]

Greetings. Is that a specific color scheme you are using? Looks cool and I'd like to use these colors as well :)

[@p99chan99]

Corfu doesnt work properly for me... I get it to work with files for programming, so do i need an LSP? Im also using elpaca to install Corfu

[@AlessandroBertulli]

In case it's useful to people watching this (excellent video!) a bit later in time like me, this is the update for version 0.29 of corfu (2022-11-19): - BREAKING: Extract the =corfu-echo= extension from =corfu.el=. In order to see echo messages, enable =corfu-echo-mode=. You probably want to enable either =corfu-echo-mode= or =corfu-popupinfo-mode=. - BREAKING: Rename =corfu-echo-documentation= to =corfu-echo-delay=. - Add =corfu-popupinfo= extension to display candidate documentation and location in a small child frame next to the candidate menu. This extension has been contributed by Yuwei Tian who assigned copyright to the FSF. The extension supersedes Yuwei's =corfu-doc= package.

[@jkolikovec]

I'm at my wits end. I've done exactly as you've done, but corfu just refuses to work

[@YisraelDovL]

Weird, I don't get the binding `C-M-i` to do completion with the minibuffer

[@jorgefernandocho7824]

Hey gavin! Great work in this channel. How come you didn't mention vertico, helm and ido? These are the ones that are on doom emacs configuration.. Thanks for the great content.

[@p99chan99]

It's been a few weeks now and I'm still having trouble to figure out a way to setup code completion in emacs, trying to configure corfu + eglot and no luck, so many of the resources I've seen have been counter-intuitive and always included other packages related to corfu in the code examples, which I don't care about. It could be new being new to emacs, but you can't lie, this shit is feels unnecessarily hard.

[@GavinFreeborn]

Give me an idea of your current state. Do you have eglot working and giving you error messages? Eglot for most languages shouldn't require any configuration. Install the lsp for that language(from your package manager), open a file, and type M-x eglot. C-M-i should provide completions even in the default emacs setup.

[@p99chan99]

@@GavinFreebornmanaged to get it working at the end!

[@theodorealenas3171]

Hi, I'm keeping notes for when I get more into Emacs, and I'm a little confused. My first thought was that these are packages of language servers but that's obviously ridiculous. However if they were just the menu UI, then why would they deprecate? So what are they. What am I giving up on by choosing one over another

[@GavinFreeborn]

When I say depreciate I was more refering to framework style solutions that do their own thing rather than trying to leverage native features. If they do their own thing then all it takes is the project to fall out of the interest of others. These all don't really have that problem however this is very common on the vim side of the pond since few actually try to leverage omnicomplete (built in way to do smart code completion) and instead treat it as an after thought.

[@herrpez]

@@GavinFreeborn The word you are looking for is not "depreciate", which means decrease in value.

[@jeffspaulding9834]

@@herrpez Depreciate has a different meaning when applied to code. It means to discourage the use of. Software changes over time, and often there will be parts of the software that are no longer developed. The developers usually want to remove these parts, but other software relies on them. So they'll depreciate it - which is their way of saying, "This still works for now, but you need to stop using it because it will be going away eventually." Emacs itself has quite a few depreciated functions - some that have been depreciated for decades - but that's because the Emacs developers really don't like removing functionality that people might rely on. Gavin's not using it completely correctly here - he's talking about bit rot (projects that are no longer maintained don't keep up with changes in Emacs and other packages and slowly become more and more incompatible with everything), but it's close enough that you can understand his meaning.

[@herrpez]

@@jeffspaulding9834 Sorry, but no. The term is "deprecate". The spelling is very similar, but the pronunciation and meaning are very different.

[@jeffspaulding9834]

Theodore: completion is actually several different tasks chained together. You need completion sources to offer possible completions, you need to decide which sources to use, and you need to have a user interface to offer those completions to the user. What's confusing for people new to Emacs is that these are done in separate packages. Sources could be language-specific (semantic, irony-mode, SLIME, geiser, etc.), multilanguage (lsp-mode, ycmd, etags/rtags/etc.), or general-purpose (dabbrev, ispell, etc.). Sometimes the sources are set up by the major mode, sometimes they're not, and sometimes you'll want to change the defaults. The front end (autocomplete, company, etc.) plugs into those sources and may provide additional sources of its own. It's not very intuitive, but it's insanely powerful. Often you'll find that just turning on something like company-mode gives you what you want; if not, it's useful to look at other people's configurations and tweak them to your liking. There's a bazillion blog posts out there and tons of people have their init.el up on github/gitlab/gitwhatever. It's also worthwhile to note that this video only covered completion at point - i.e. completion at the point where your cursor is. There is also minibuffer completion, which is where you'll see packages like ido, ivy, helm, etc.

[@burgerkino]

What font do you use

[@gassechen]

Hola. Tus vídeos son geniales. Podrías hablar un poco más pausado para los no hablantes nativos de inglés? Gracias

[@matsmcmats]

Set the playback speed to 0.75? (:

[@markpi2350]

nice video

[@konrad1977]

Which mode-line package are you using?

[@GavinFreeborn]

I just use my own custom one. You can find it in my config

[@DaveRoberts308]

I’m not sure I know what “native” means in the context of Emacs. Except for low-level buffer routines, almost everything else is written in Lisp.

[@alrightsquinky7798]

By “native” he means features that are part of core Emacs, not a third-party plugin. Has nothing to do with native code.

[@dantheshadowgamesyt3636]

Emacs is awesome, but it lacks a good editor.

[@larrasket]

lol

[@GreyDeathVaccine]

Dad joke :D

[@jeffspaulding9834]

That's what evil-mode is for :)

[@JariAalto]

Unfortunately the pace of the video is extremely fast, practically unfollowable. A much more slower speaking, typing and overall presentation would be more instructive.