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I've been starting to use dynamic completion with icicle-support in Emacs (command icicle-complete with dynamic-completion-mode on), but now I've stumbled over hippie-expand and it sounds like they both are doing very similar things, so I'm not sure which one to use. What is even the difference between the two?

Alexander Praehauser
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  • I know what `hippie-expand` is, but what do you *specifically* mean by "dynamic completion"? – phils Apr 10 '23 at 11:26
  • @phils Ah, sorry, I should have been more precise. I'm using the command `icicle-complete` with `dynamic-completion-mode` on. – Alexander Praehauser Apr 10 '23 at 11:28
  • @Drew That's weird, I think it should be quite old. I have the instructions from here: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles_-_Completion_in_Other_Buffers#h5o-3 but I'm pretty sure it doesn't depend on `icicles`. – Alexander Praehauser Apr 10 '23 at 15:36

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I can't answer the question well about comparing the two. But the doc of each should help. completion.el is very old, and the only doc for it is in that source file.

completion.el works with the text you type. It can learn from what you type, if you tell it to. It can save what it's "learned" persistently, if you want it to. In other respects it's similar to dabbrev.

hippie-expand, as I understand it, knows various predefined ways of computing different kinds of things. You can have it use dabbrev as one of the ways, for example.

Hopefully someone else will provide a better description of hippie-expand and perhaps compare the two better. I don't expect that there's really any overlap between the two, but I could be wrong. You can no doubt use both, binding them to different keys.

My guess is that the best approach is to just experiment with each. To start with what completion.el offers (with or without Icicles), read the Commentary in the source file.

Drew
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