Ivy: do *not* fix :preselect getting deselected with new input

[raxod502]

I noticed the recent commit 4fef67f. Actually, I would like the contrary behavior: when any key is typed, the selection should be moved to the first candidate, disregarding the preselected candidate (if any). Is there a way I can achieve this behavior?

[abo-abo]

The recent commit fixed a clearly not intended behavior of the index remaining at 1 (zero-based) while sliding to non-:preselect on input.

Your intended behavior should be there, related to ivy-index-functions-alist and ivy-recompute-index-zero. Further investigation is necessary on why it doesn't work currently.

[raxod502]

Yes, I noticed that the faulty behavior is a bit hard to reproduce (though it is consistent with a given test case).

Example test case, click to expand

For example, with some nonstandard settings enabled, I ran C-h f with point on the symbol regexp-quote. This caused Ivy to preselect that candidate in the menu:

I would now expect that if I type a character, my selection moves back to the beginning of the list. That doesn't happen:

But if I type a second character, it does:

And most puzzling of all, if I delete the second character, then my selection is back at the beginning as it should have been in the first place:

If I delete the first character, then I'm back at the preselected candidate, and can repeat the process as desired:

If you don't see the behavior in your own configuration, then I can see about getting a test case that starts from emacs -Q.

[raxod502]

@abo-abo Actually, this is very easy to reproduce. Simply activate counsel-mode from the latest version of this repository (be6db35), place point at the end of regexp-quote, run C-h f, and then type r (this changes the input from ^ to ^r). Then the menu changes from:

to:

whereas I would like it to return me to the beginning of the menu, like this:

[raxod502]

@abo-abo The code which causes this behavior is:

swiper/ivy.el

Lines 3066 to 3072 in be6db35

	(and (not (string= name ""))
	(not (and ivy--flx-featurep
	(eq ivy--regex-function 'ivy--regex-fuzzy)
	(< (length cands) 200)))
	ivy--old-cands
	(cl-position (ivy-state-current ivy-last) cands
	:test #'equal))

The code allows for the index to be maintained if the previously selected candidate is still available in the list. That would make sense for a manually selected candidate, but perhaps a case needs to be added there so that the logic is not triggered in the case of a preselected candidate.

[raxod502]

Created #1573.