How to disable orderless for company or corfu

[ydzhou]

Hi

How can I disable orderless for autocompletion plugin e.g. company-mode or corfu? But still keep it enabled for consult.

[oantolin]

One simple way to do it would be to set completion-styles to whatever you want to use for corfu and company, and add to minibuffer-mode-hook a function that set the completion-styles locally in the minibuffer to something that includes orderless. Like this:

(setq completion-styles '(basic partial-completion)) ; styles for corfu & company

(defun use-orderless ()
  (setq-local completion-styles '(orderless))) ; styles for minibuffer commands such as consult commands

(add-hook 'minibuffer-mode-hook #'use-orderless)

But maybe, in case this is an XY problem, let me ask: why do you want to disable orderless for corfu and company?

[ydzhou]

Hi @oantolin , yeah I prefer company/corfu use substring for completion. When I type something, normally I can remember the prefix of what I am trying to type, so orderless is an overkill for me.

[minad]

@oantolin

One simple way to do it would be to set completion-styles to whatever you want to use for corfu and company, and add to minibuffer-mode-hook a function that set the completion-styles locally in the minibuffer to something that includes orderless.

That's not such a good fix actually, when taking more packages like Consult into account. I haven't found the ideal fix for Corfu yet to be honest. The problem with activating orderless only within the minibuffer is that it doesn't play nicely with consult-line which uses the completion-styles to jump to the position of the match (even after closing the minibuffer). One could then work around this problem by setting completion-category-overrides for consult-location but that's also not great. For Company the solution is to modify the completion styles with an advice around company-capf. Such an advice does not work for Corfu since Corfu uses completion-all-completions and completion-try-completion at many more places.

[oantolin]

Fair enough, @ydzhou.

I obviously hadn't checked all the consequences, @minad. Thanks for pointing those issues out. As for a good way to control completion-styles for Corfu, is there any way to detect if Corfu is currently open, some varíable or something? If so, one could write a new completion style that simply delegates to one completion style or another depending on whether Corfu is asking or not.

[oantolin]

Also, consult-line already stores a marker in a text property, right? Isn't that marker obtained while the minibuffer is open? Why does it need to use completion again. Or am I just wrong about the location being stored in a text property, @minad ?

[minad]

In order to highlight the matches.

[oantolin]

In order to highlight the matches.

Oh, right!

[failable]

This works, but messy.

  (defvar osfva-default-completion-styles
    (let ((sv (get 'completion-styles 'standard-value)))
      (and (consp sv)
           (condition-case nil
               (eval (car sv) t)
             (error completion-styles)))))

  (defvar osfva-enable-orderless-in-company nil)

  (defun osfva-toggle-enable-orderless-in-company ()
    (interactive)
    (setq osfva-enable-orderless-in-company
          (not osfva-enable-orderless-in-company)))

  (defun osfva-company-disable-orderless (orig-fun &rest args)
    "Diable orderless completion style when company is doing the completion."
    (let ((completion-styles (if osfva-enable-orderless-in-company
                                 completion-styles
                               osfva-default-completion-styles)))
      (apply orig-fun args)))
  (advice-add #'company--perform :around #'osfva-company-disable-orderless)

https://osfva.com/20210721000000-%E5%9C%A8company_mode%E8%A1%A5%E5%85%A8%E8%BF%87%E7%A8%8B%E4%B8%AD%E7%A6%81%E7%94%A8orderless/