Update Citar history when opening items via Embark

[rudolf-adamkovic]

I recently started using citar with embark. In my setup, I save citar-history using savehist, so that citar-open shows the recently accessed items first. Now that I use embark, I noticed that if I open, say notes, for some item using C-. n, then the item does not become first in the list. I would greatly appreciate if any "open" action moved the item to the top of the list.

[bdarcus]

I recently started using citar with embark. In my setup, I save citar-history using savehist, so that citar-open shows the recently accessed items first. Now that I use embark, I noticed that if I open, say notes, for some item using C-. n, then the item does not become first in the list. I would greatly appreciate if any "open" action moved the item to the top of the list.

@oantolin - any input on this history question? Is there something I can and should be doing to resolve this on my end?

[oantolin]

I'm not very familiar with citar yet unfortunately, so maybe I'm barking barking up the wrong tree but C-. n runs citar-open-notes, right? Have you checked that running citar-open-notes directly (without using embark) does move the item to the top of the list, @salutis?

[rudolf-adamkovic]

@oantolin

Have you checked that running citar-open-notes directly (without using embark) does move the item to the top of the list, @salutis?

I have just tried it, and it does.

[oantolin]

Oh boy, it probably has to do with the mechanism Embark uses to "press RET for you" after injecting the target. I use exit-minibuffer, but maybe that doesn't give completing-read a chance to update the history? I'll look into it.

[minad]

I suspect this is rather an issue of completing-read-multiple or consult-completing-read-multiple in combination with embark-quit-after-action=nil.

The underlying problem is that the history is a bit ill defined for completing-read-multiple. For example describe-face on emacs -Q stores face1,face2,face3 strings in the face-name-history. The Vertico history sorting does not handle such multi candidates (and neither does the default completion system). In comparison consult-completing-read-multiple implements its own history handling and adds candidates separately to the history such that the sorting by history in Vertico and the default UI works. Consult is bending the semantics here but I don't want to special case crm sorting in Vertico.

This history handling interferes probably with Embark here. So the issue should be fixed in consult-completing-read-multiple if this is indeed the problem. But it is also not obvious to me how the issue can be fixed.

[bdarcus]

OK, thanks for the clarification @minad . I'm going to close this issue, then, since we can reasonably conclude this is not an issue with citar.