Emacs: decent defaults I shared with Sacha Chua (protesilaos.com)

submitted 4 months ago by NanoooK@sh.itjust.works to c/emacs@lemmy.ml

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[-] Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Every blog post like this contains a bunch of new variables I've never heard of but always wanted. Like help-window-keep-selected or window-combination-resize.

Putting that aside though, am I the only one who likes the built-in completions buffer?

(use-package minibuffer
  :custom
  (completions-format 'one-column)
  (completions-sort 'historical)   ; Emacs 30
  (completions-max-height 20)
  (completion-styles '(basic partial-completion substring))
  (completion-auto-select t)
  (completion-ignore-case t))

I like that it doesn't move the modeline up for completion and that it feels like shell completion. It also works for completion at-point.

The variable completion-auto-select is load bearing for my workflow though, before I knew about it I very much thought I needed icomplete or vertico.

[-] tomenzgg@midwest.social 3 points 4 months ago

I tend to like it, too (though I can't tell if that's just because it's what I first used and now I just expect it to work that way, now…).

Do you know if there's a way to go backwards through available options, though? I forget what shift+tab does but its not the inverse of tab and having to cycle all the way through to come back around on a particularly large list of options sure is tedious.

I think that's just about my only complaint with the default.

[-] sachac@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 months ago

Maybe M-p?

[-] tomenzgg@midwest.social 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Not quite (though I hadn't realized, before this thread, that such an option existed); I was more thinking of tabbing in the opposite direction for minibuffer-complete.

I sort of lay out everything in the comment at https://midwest.social/comment/24082938 but the short of it is that I realized that minibuffer-complete does have functionality already built it: it just doesn't seem to work when trying to to autocompletion in Eval:. So I didn't realize that it'd work in circumstances like M-x.

Thanks so much for the suggestion, though! 'Appreciate the help.

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this post was submitted on 08 May 2026

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