CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file. The format is based on Keep a Changelog.

6.3.1 (released 2024-08-03)

Bugs fixed

• In version 6.3 a bug was introduced that caused vertico-directory-enter to no longer remember candidates. This has been fixed.

6.3 (released 2024-02-25)

Enhancements

• The completion style now supports lazy highlighting via completion-lazy-hilit and completion-lazy-hilit-fn, new in Emacs 30 and already supported by some completion UIs (#152, #153).

Bugs fixed

• Change how candidates are remembered for Vertico to work with vertico-directory-enter and to remember the minibuffer contents when exiting the minibuffer.
• Use corfu--initial-state if corfu--state-vars is not bound (#158, #159).

6.2 (released 2023-11-23)

Features

• New user option prescient-tiebreaker which can be used to change how matches with no recency information are sorted, instead of by length (#128).

Internal Changes

• prescient-filter now only propertizes the first returned candidate for use with prescient-sort-full-matches-first (#148). Custom sorting functions using this data should be changed to search the candidates for the properties, as in prescient--get-sort-info.

Bugs fixed

• Fix highlighting of the first prefix in the prefix filter method (#149).

Enhancements

• Improve filter situation when using prefix, initialism, and prescient-sort-full-matches-first by tweaking prefix (#149).
  • Previously, with the input "re", prefix would match all of the string "repeat", which would sort it higher than "restart-emacs" when attempting to use "re" as an initialism.
  • Now, the prefix "re" only matches the "re" in "repeat", but does not match the entire word. If there is no non-word character in the subquery, prefix matching is now done non-greedily.
  • Continuing without change, "str-re" still fully matches "string-rectangle" and ".g" still fully matches ".gitignore". The inclusion of a non-word character means that these inputs couldn't be used as initialisms anyway, so there is no conflict when matching greedily for these inputs.

6.1 (released 2022-12-16)

New features

• Add package vertico-prescient, which integrates prescient.el with Vertico (#131). New mode vertico-prescient-mode configures sorting, candidate remembrance, filtering, and binds the toggling commands in Vertico.

• Add package corfu-prescient, which integrates prescient.el with Corfu (#131). New mode corfu-prescient-mode configures sorting, candidate remembrance, filtering, and binds the toggling commands while the Corfu pop-up is active.

6.0 (released 2022-11-11)

Bugs fixed

• Toggling off filter methods no longer accidentally changes the global value of prescient-filter-method. See #123, #124.

• Always require the library char-fold so that char-fold-table is defined. This variable apparently isn't always loaded when we call char-fold-to-regexp. See #126, #127.

• Fix the filter methods literal and literal-prefix not being literal when prescient-use-char-folding was nil. This bug was added with that user option. See #127.

New features

• Add new function prescient-sort-full-matches-first which implements the option. This feature already existed, but moving to a separate function makes it easier to support in more UIs. See #125.

• Add a completion style prescient. This completion style can be used in the variable completion-styles. This completion style works with UIs like Emacs's built-in minibuffer completion, Icomplete, and Vertico. See various discussions in #125, #120, #112, #89, #58, and #54.

• Add new function prescient-completion-sort, which combines prescient-sort with the new function prescient-sort-full-matches-first (#125). This function is meant to be used after filtering and as the sorting function of your preferred completion UI. Note that sorting fully matched candidates before partially matched candidates only works for candidates filtered by the prescient completion style.

• Added user option prescient-completion-highlight-matches, which determines whether the completion style highlights the matching parts of candidates with the above new faces (#125).

• Add faces prescient-primary-highlight and prescient-secondary-highlight (#125). These faces are used with the completion style and selectrum-prescient.el. The old faces selectrum-prescient-primary-highlight and selectrum-prescient-secondary-highlight are now obsolete aliases of these faces.

Enhancements

• prescient-filter now supports filtering candidates from Emacs's more generic "completion tables", not just lists of strings (#125). However, like with some other completion styles, it does not work well with certain dynamic completion tables that use a prefix string to produce candidates before filtering. To work around this, it is recommended to include the basic style after the prescient style in the user option completion-styles.

Internal Changes

• prescient-filter now uses the C function all-completions instead of being completely written in Emacs Lisp. This should make it a bit faster. See #125.

5.2.1 (released 2022-06-01)

Bugs fixed

• ivy doesn't convert all variables to string when sorting or calling prescient-remember, so it need to preprocess when work with ivy-prescient.el. if not, an wrong-type-argument error may occur. This issue affects the use of format-all-buffer (#119).

5.2 (released 2021-12-27)

New features

• Two new user options, selectrum-prescient-enable-filtering and selectrum-prescient-enable-sorting, which allow the user to selectively disable the filtering or sorting functionalities of selectrum-prescient.el (#100).
• New command selectrum-prescient-toggle-char-fold, bound to M-s ' in the minibuffer.
• To configure match highlighting you can use the faces selectrum-prescient-primary-highlight and selectrum-prescient-secondary-highlight. The previously used Selectrum faces selectrum-primary-highlight and selectrum-secondary-highlight will get removed from Selectrum proper (#94, #97).
• The user option prescient-sort-full-matches-first was added. If non-nil, candidates that are fully matched are sorted before partially matched candidates, though all candidates still follow the order of recency, frequency, and length. See #95.
• The user option prescient-use-char-folding was added. If non-nil, the literal and literal-prefix filter methods will use character folding. See #98. This can be used to help avoid the problems reported in #92 and #93.
• The user option prescient-use-case-folding was added. This feature affects the use of all filters. It can be one of nil, t, or smart (the default). If smart, then case folding is disabled when upper-case characters are sought. In Selectrum, the toggling command selectrum-prescient-toggle-case-fold was bound to M-s c. See #105.
• The command prescient-forget was added. When used, prescient.el will immediately forget a candidate (#109).

Enhancements

• prescient-filter-method accepts a function which returns the desired filter methods (#110).
• selectrum-prescient.el: Match faces are now combined with faces that might be already present on candidates instead of replacing them which gives better visual results in these cases (#101, #103).

Internal changes

• The user option selectrum-should-sort-p was deprecated in Selectrum 3.1 in favor of selectrum-should-sort. selectrum-prescient.el now uses the updated option name (#99).

Bugs fixed

• A typo was fixed that prevented secondary highlighting (such as the initials in initialism matching) from being applied. Functions in prescient-filter-alist were being passed the keyword argument :with-groups instead of the correct :with-group. For consistency, the with-groups argument of prescient-filter-regexps was changed to with-group. See #106.
• Previously, when char folding was enabled, long queries could cause a crash with the error "Regular expression too big". This has now been fixed (#71).

5.1 (released 2021-02-26)

Enhancements

• Literal-prefix matching, a new filter method whose behavior is that the first subquery must be the prefix of the candidate and the remaining subqueries must be prefixes of words in the candidate. Supports char folding just like literal.

  For example, if the input is foo bar, then the candidate must begin with foo, and it must also contain a word starting with bar. That means it would match foo-and-bar or fooboo-barquux but not bar-foo (because that doesn't start with foo) or foo-qbar (because bar is no prefix of some word).

  It can be enabled by adding literal-prefix to prescient-filter-method.

• Anchored matching, a new filtering method that uses uppercase letters and symbols as beginning of word, similar to initialism. It can be enabled by adding anchored to prescient-filter-method.

  For example TTL matches toogle-truncate-lines and FiAPo or fiAPo match both find-file-at-point and find-function-at-point. However fiFiAPo matches only the former and fiFuAPo matches only the latter. See #70 and #76.

• Prefix matching, a new filtering method similar to the Emacs completion style partial, was added. It can be enabled by adding prefix to prescient-filter-method.

  As is the case in partial completion, t-t-l matches toggle-truncate-lines and fi--a-po matches find-file-at-point, find-function-at-point, and other similarly named symbols. One difference is that you can't use * as a wildcard (it is instead taken literally), since you can achieve the same effect by separating queries with a space. See #67 and #76.

• Literal matching now supports char folding making Unicode text filtering much easier (#66).

• In selectrum-prescient.el, commands were added for toggling the active filtering methods in the Selectrum buffer. See #72.

  • This toggling is a buffer-local effect, and doesn't change the default behavior (determined by prescient-filter-method).

  • With a prefix argument, a command unconditionally toggles on its respective filtering method and toggles off all others.

  • While selectrum-prescient-mode is enabled, M-s is bound to selectrum-prescient-toggle-map in the Selectrum buffer, and is used as a prefix key to access the commands. The macro selectrum-prescient-create-and-bind-toggle-command can be used to create a toggling command for a filter, and bind that command in selectrum-prescient-toggle-map.

    Key	Command
    M-s a	selectrum-prescient-toggle-anchored
    M-s f	selectrum-prescient-toggle-fuzzy
    M-s i	selectrum-prescient-toggle-initialism
    M-s l	selectrum-prescient-toggle-literal
    M-s p	selectrum-prescient-toggle-prefix
    M-s P	selectrum-prescient-toggle-literal-prefix
    M-s r	selectrum-prescient-toggle-regexp
    M-s '

• The user option prescient-filter-alist was added, which describes the relationship between the symbols in prescient-filter-list and the corresponding functions that produce regular expressions for matching candidates. Users can create their own filter methods by adding a symbol-function pair to prescient-filter-alist and use that custom method by adding the symbol to prescient-filter-method. See #77.

  The functions that produce the regexps used for searching candidates are now considered public. They are

  • prescient-anchored-regexp
  • prescient-fuzzy-regexp
  • prescient-initials-regexp
  • prescient-literal-regexp
  • prescient-prefix-regexp
  • prescient-regexp-regexp
  • prescient-with-group

5.0 (released 2020-07-16)

Breaking changes

• Candidates which are not strings are no longer supported. This improves performance by a few percent, and there was never any real reason to support non-strings. (Frameworks like Selectrum should convert candidates to strings before interfacing with prescient.el.)

Enhancements

• Fuzzy matching now uses lazy wildcards, so only the minimum amount of each candidate will be highlighted in results from Selectrum or Ivy, rather than the maximum.

Bugs fixed

• In selectrum-prescient.el, secondary highlighting now works correctly when multiple filter methods are enabled (#123).

Performance

• The speed of prescient-sort has been improved by a factor of 2x for large collections. The speed of prescient-filter has been improved by a factor of 3x.

4.1 (released 2020-03-31)

Enhancements

• Package selectrum-prescient.el now uses selectrum-candidate-inserted-hook to update the frecency database of prescient.el when using TAB (selectrum-insert-current-candidate) to enter directories while finding files with Selectrum.

Bugs fixed

• Previously, if you explicitly enabled any of the minor modes ivy-prescient-mode, company-prescient-mode, or selectrum-prescient-mode when it was already on, then disabling the mode would not work correctly (some variables would fail to be reset). This has been fixed.

4.0 (released 2019-12-21)

Breaking changes

• Due to internal changes in Ivy and Counsel which make it extremely difficult and brittle to control sorting in a fine-grained manner, candidates for all commands are now sorted by default. You can still configure the behavior in ivy-prescient-sort-commands, which has a new default value and now also has the ability to specify a blacklist of commands (used in the new default, which excludes swiper and ivy-switch-buffer) in addition to a whitelist (used in the old default).

Added

• New package selectrum-prescient provides integration with Selectrum, a modern alternative to Ivy and Helm. It provides a single entry point, selectrum-prescient-mode, which may be enabled in your init-file. This package is likely to be essentially bug-free when compared to ivy-prescient, because of the vastly simpler API on which it depends.

Enhancements

• The function prescient-filter usually made a new copy of the input list, but didn't do this in the case that there was nothing to filter out. That was subtle behavior with the potential for causing bugs, so now prescient-filter is guaranteed to always make a copy of the input list.

Bugs fixed

• Recent commits to Counsel (including 9da800 and 2d840b) resulted in candidates for many commands no longer being sorted. This has been fixed.

Removed

• Function prescient-initials-regexp, which was deprecated in release 2.2 over a year ago.

3.3 (released 2019-09-20)

Enhancements

• New user option prescient-aggressive-file-save to enable saving the cache data more aggressively according to the discussions (#17 and #39).
• The minor mode ivy-prescient-mode now affects the completion-in-region command by default, without the need for the user to change the value of ivy-sort-functions-alist (#41).

Bugs fixed

• An update to Ivy caused ivy-prescient.el to no longer have any effect for the ivy-completion-in-region command. This has been fixed (#41, #42).

3.2 (released 2019-07-06)

New features

• New user options prescient-sort-length-enable and company-prescient-sort-length-enable allow disabling prescient.el sorting by length, without disabling sorting altogether.

Enhancements

• The fuzzy regex builder now matches the first occurrence of each character in the query, giving more intuitive results when highlighted (#37).

Bugs fixed

• Logic error which caused a crash on an all-whitespace query has now been fixed.

3.1 (released 2019-05-23)

Enhancements

• Previously, ivy-prescient.el would only remember directories that the user operated on with an action (for example, opening them with Dired). Now it will remember all intermediate directories used in navigation (#36).

3.0 (released 2019-04-10)

New features

• The user option prescient-filter-method now accepts a list of filter methods that will be applied in order until one matches. This allows for any combination of filter methods (#29). The default value has changed from literal+initialism to (literal regexp initialism), which provides a superset of functionality.
• Two new user options, ivy-prescient-enable-filtering and ivy-prescient-enable-sorting, which allow the user to selectively disable the filtering or sorting functionalities of ivy-prescient.el (#32).

Enhancements

• Previously, if you had set prescient-filter-method to regexp and entered an invalid regexp with ivy-prescient.el, then the candidate list would not update. Now, the list is cleared until your regexp is valid again. This behavior is more consistent and predictable.

Bugs fixed

• Fixed sorting in filename-based collections (#28).
• Fixed an issue where Ivy actions that accepted a list of candidates were being handled incorrectly (#33).

Removed

• Removed ivy-prescient-filter-method-keys and ivy-prescient-persist-filter-method because regexp is now part of the default filter method, and therefore these are no longer needed (#15, #24, and #27).
• Removed ivy-prescient-excluded-commands because ivy-prescient.el now automatically detects if sorting is enabled in a collection.

2.2.2 (released 2019-02-12)

Enhancements

• The Custom groups for the user options prescient-persist-mode, ivy-prescient-mode, and company-prescient-mode have now been set properly to prescient (instead of each being in its own group).

Bugs fixed

• ivy-prescient now depends on version 0.11.0 of ivy, rather than 0.10.0. This long-awaited release includes a number of bugfixes which are critical for correct operation of ivy-prescient.

2.2.1 (released 2018-09-22)

Fixed

• Previously, if the user or some other code had customized print-length or print-level, then these settings could break the ability of prescient.el to persist history and frequency data to prescient-save-file. Now, persistence works regardless of the values of these variables (#16).

2.2 (released 2018-08-23)

New features

• New user option prescient-filter-method allows you to use substring, initialism, regexp, or fuzzy matching (#13).
• By default, you can use C-c C-r in Ivy to toggle between substring/initialism matching and regexp matching. Bindings can be customized in the new user option ivy-prescient-filter-method-keys. By default, the changes do not persist between Ivy sessions, but this can be customized using the new user option ivy-prescient-persist-filter-method.

Deprecated

• The function prescient-initials-regexp is now considered deprecated and it should not be used. Changes to its behavior will however be documented until it is removed in a future release.

2.1 (released 2018-07-25)

New features

• New user option ivy-prescient-retain-classic-highlighting allows you to more closely emulate the highlighting behavior of Ivy when ivy-prescient-mode is enabled (#11).

Enhancements

• API function prescient-filter-regexps now has special behavior when the symbol all is passed as the WITH-GROUPS argument. The documentation string for this function, which was previously erroneous, has been fixed (#11).
• For some reason, Ivy explicitly supports candidates which are lists, by just taking their cars. ivy-prescient.el now does the same, instead of converting the lists to strings. This reduces bloat in the save file, and in some cases improves frequency tracking (for example, frequency tracking works much better for org-refile-get-location).

2.0 (released 2018-06-26)

Changed

• ivy-prescient.el now clears the value of ivy-initial-inputs-alist when ivy-prescient-mode is enabled, in order to allow functions like counsel-describe-function to work out of the box (#7).

Fixed

• Previously, ivy-prescient.el didn't work with the latest version of counsel-projectile because that package relied on certain undocumented semantics of the ivy-read API. This is now fixed (#6).

1.0 (released 2018-06-05)

Added

• Packages:
  • prescient.el
  • ivy-prescient.el
  • company-prescient.el
• User options:
  • prescient-history-length
  • prescient-frequency-decay
  • prescient-frequency-threshold
  • prescient-save-file
  • ivy-prescient-excluded-commands
  • ivy-prescient-sort-commands
• Minor modes:
  • prescient-persist-mode
  • ivy-prescient-mode
  • company-prescient-mode
• API functions:
  • prescient-split-query
  • prescient-initials-regexp
  • prescient-filter-regexps
  • prescient-filter
  • prescient-sort-compare
  • prescient-sort
  • prescient-remember