[Feature/WIP] Add selectrum et al support

[mtreca]

First of all thanks for this great package.

I recently moved to the selectrum completing framework, which plays very nicely with a certain number of other utilities such as marginalia for minibuffer annotations and embark for minibuffer actions.

Having a selectrum-bibtex frontend leveraging these tools would be great. I started working on a POC, I will open a PR when something usable comes out of it.

[bdarcus]

Yes please!

Happy to provide feedback.

[mtreca]

Awesome. I managed to port most of the features from ivy-bibtex quite easily. Working on marginalia support now!

[minad]

@mtreca I am not sure if you are using my Consult package, but I wonder if you could do the selectrum-bibtex port in the spirit of Consult by using completing-read instead of Selectrum-specific APIs? This way one would get compatibility with other completion systems like default completion, Icomplete-vertical and Selectrum.

[mtreca]

I am actually using your consult--read helper function in my script, which I guess is completing-read friendly. I will look into it!

[minad]

@mtreca Yes, consult--read is using completing-read. It is okay to use consult--read if

• You need the special functionality provided by consult--read.
• You are fine with making your package depend on Consult.
• You are fine with possibly being affected by breakage due to changes of consult--read (Hopefully such changes will be rare)

[mtreca]

While I think that most selectrum users will have consult, marginalia et al installed it might be better to use completing-read to limit dependencies. Embark will be necessary however since selectrum-bibtex will have to provide multiple actions during completion.

[tmalsburg]

Hi all, I'm not familiar with selectrum but in principle I'm happy to include support for frameworks other than helm and ivy. Note however that bibtex-completion (the backend) is available as a separate MELPA package, so you could host selectrum support also in a separate repository. I don't know enough about what you're planning to be able to say whether that makes more sense than including selectrum support here. The ivy and helm front-ends are sufficiently similar to benefit from being maintained by the same person in the same repo but the selectrum front-end may be different.

[minad]

@tmalsburg From what I see bibtex-completion uses completing-read and is already supported by Selectrum as is. Maybe @mtreca wants to provide additional actions and annotations via Embark and Marginalia?

[mtreca]

@tmalsburg Thanks for your comment, I did not know that bibtex-completion was available as a separate package. Most of my work so far is very similar to ivy-bibtex, and the finished product should be around the same amount of code (less than 200 LOC).
@minad Yes, my main aim is to provide an "out-of-the-box" experience similar to ivy-bibtex, including actions on completions and possibly annotations for selectrum/icomplete users.

[tmalsburg]

@mtreca If selectum-bibtex closely follows ivy-bibex, it might make sense to host it here, so we can add new features there as well. But as you prefer.

I recommend having a look at helm-bibtex as well. Since helm-bibtex is older, has more users, since it's the framework that I'm using myself, and since helm is more powerful, it may have features that are absent in ivy.

[bdarcus]

Just a thought: maybe start a separate repo as you work on it, and to get feedback, and if it makes sense to merge here when closer to " done", then do that?

[tmalsburg]

From what I see bibtex-completion uses completing-read and is already supported by Selectrum as is.

bibtex-completion has no front-end for seaching bibtex entries. It uses completing-read only in some actions that can be applied to entries once they have been selected. If selectrum supports bibtex-completion there must be some supporting glue code for that somewhere. A small handful of lines is probably enough to get something basic rolling.

[minad]

@tmalsburg @mtreca

The most economic approach is the following - Add a completion category to the completing-read calls in bibtex-completion! Then provide Embark actions and Marginalia annotations in separate packages bibtex-marginalia bibtex-embark. This way you can simply reuse the bibtex-completion package without modifications. This is the intended design of Marginalia and Embark.
Note that Marginalia and Embark have been designed to extend existing commands, for example commands living in the Emacs code base itself, like find-file, switch-to-buffer etc.

If you don't want to add a completion category in bibtex-completion, you can also add a prompt classifier to Marginalia such that the completion category of the bibtex-completion completing-read is adjusted.

[minad]

@tmalsburg

bibtex-completion has no front-end for seaching bibtex entries. It uses completing-read only in some actions that can be applied to entries once they have been selected. If selectrum supports bibtex-completion there must be some supporting glue code for that somewhere. A small handful of lines is probably enough to get something basic rolling.

Why not? If you would add this, annotations and actions could be simply injected from outside without modifications to the bibtex-completion package itself.