Would Alfred Hitchcock use Emacs?
First you have to excuse the awful title, but a cinephile cannot resist the temptation of an easy reference when the Emacs package he is going to write about is called Vertico.
Daniel Mendler has become such a prolific contributor to our Emacs world. His work with Omar Antolín Camarena and Clemens Radermacher (to name a few!) has been showing me how much can be done with little improvements on Emacs default completion system. Actually, “little” is a bit unfair to them because they have been putting a lot of effort in their packages and contributions. What “little” stands for instead is the amount of code I had to add to my init.el to get a superb completion UI. I combine Vertico with Orderless and I didn’t have to do much beside this after the installation via package.el:
Well, to be fair I did something more, like binding vertico-exit-input to C-j and setting orderless-matching-styles to orderless-regexp, plus I am using Daniel’s consult to extend Vertico capabilities, but I guess you see where I am going by now. The combination of small packages makes for a modular system that I can interact with more easily. For instance, Daniel can go berserk and forget about the lovely 500 lines of code limit he set himself to with Vertico. Why should I trust this criminal mind, then? I can switch to Selectrum and keep using Consult and Orderless with it1.
