Suggested configuration for non-programmers?

[BrianZbr]

My coding skills are minimal, but I use emacs for writing papers in org-mode. I'm looking for an auto-completion feature that will help me type faster and more accurately, similar to what is typically found on a smartphone. I posted this question on the Emacs Stackexchange, which is what led me to company-mode.

Now I've played with company-mode a bit and I've read the basic documentation. My sense is that company-mode could be very useful to me if I could get the backend and the other settings right. But that would be very challenging for me to try and figure out on my own.

So if you can suggest a configuration which is optimized for writing, I would greatly appreciate it.

Here are some relevant thoughts based on my experience with company-mode so far. I'm not sure if these things can be easily addressed through the right configuration, or not. Let me know if any of these ideas may warrant a feature request and I will make one.

• Hippie-expand seems to do a slightly better job finding candidates for me. Here is the function list I have it set with: (try-expand-all-abbrevs try-expand-dabbrev try-expand-dabbrev-all-buffers try-expand-dabbrev-from-kill try-complete-file-name-partially try-complete-file-name try-expand-list try-expand-line try-complete-lisp-symbol-partially try-complete-lisp-symbol)
• I'd like to have the option of calling up a list of candidates before the idle timer runs out with a keybinding like M-/
• If I'm not mistaken, whenever company-mode finds exactly one single candidate, then it shows that candidate with underlining instead of opening a menu. If I could pull up the full list of candidates as just described, then I would always want the top candidate to appear that same way as soon as it is found, even if there are other candidates.
• If there is a candidate which can be found both through dabbrev and with ispell, that should probably take precedence over a candidate which can only be found in dabbrev, because it's likely to be misspelled.
• I do not normally want candidates with numerical digits and/or special characters like % or $. It is probably OK to hide those candidates from me completely.
• If I have already typed the complete word and it is correctly spelled, then I only want to see candidates that are longer, and are valid words (like, according to ispell). So, if I have typed "contact", then "contacted", "contacting", etc. are candidates but not "contact" itself or anything like "contact.", "contact'", etc.
• A little bit of "fuzziness" would help a lot, but not too much. The key thing is, if I'm misspelling a word, company-mode should still help me.

[dgutov]

Hi there!

Overall, you can get some of the items in the list, but others seem to be calling for a new backend, which would perform spelling corrections and do dictionary-based sorting and filtering. Maybe you should ask on Reddit or on IRC if someone would like to write a backend like that. My own interests lie primarily in code completion.

Hippie-expand seems to do a slightly better job finding candidates for me.

You can still have a separate binding for it.

I'd like to have the option of calling up a list of candidates before the idle timer runs out

(global-set-key (kbd "C-/") 'company-complete)

If I could pull up the full list of candidates as just described, then I would always want the top candidate to appear that same way as soon as it is found, even if there are other candidates.

Replace company-preview-if-just-one-frontend with company-preview in company-frontends.

I do not normally want candidates with numerical digits and/or special characters like % or $.

Add a function that would remove them, to company-transformers.

[BrianZbr]

OK, thank you for the information... I'll close the issue for now.