The Completions Buffer Is Now Enough

My last post was a tour of Emacs 31, which has since moved into pretest. Sean Whitton announced 31.0.91, the second pretest, on July 23rd, and that's what I'm writing this on. One of the sections in that post was a short list of new completion knobs, three lines of config I mentioned and moved on from. Those three lines turned into a month-long experiment, so they get their own post.

I know how that title reads, so let me put it in context before you close the tab. It comes from someone who ran company, moved to Corfu, and then left Corfu behind for icomplete, which has been my weapon of choice for years now, for both the minibuffer and in-buffer completion.

And I didn't just use icomplete. I sent patches to it. bug#75784, which brought vertical in-buffer behavior and prefix indicators…