emacs/lisp/external-completion.el

;;; external-completion.el --- Let external tools control completion style  -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-

;; Copyright (C) 2018-2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

;; Version: 0.1
;; Author: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
;; Maintainer: João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com>
;; Keywords:

;; This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
;; it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
;; the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
;; (at your option) any later version.

;; This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
;; but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
;; MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
;; GNU General Public License for more details.

;; You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
;; along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

;;; Commentary:

;; Written by Stefan Monnier circa 2016.  Variants of this code have
;; been working stably in SLY and other packages for a long time.

;; The `external' completion style is used with a "programmable
;; completion" table that gathers completions from an external tool
;; such as a shell utility, an inferior process, an http server.

;; The table and external tool are fully in control of the matching of
;; the pattern string to the potential candidates of completion.
;; When `external' is in use, the usual styles configured by the user
;; or other in `completion-styles' are ignored.
;;
;; This compromise is for speed: all other styles need the full data
;; set to be available in Emacs' addressing space, which is often slow
;; if not completely unfeasible.
;;
;; To make use of the `external' style the function
;; `external-completion-table' should be used.  See its docstring.

;;; Code:
(require 'cl-lib)

(add-to-list 'completion-styles-alist
             '(external
               external-completion--try-completion
               external-completion--all-completions
               "Ad-hoc completion style provided by the completion table."))

(defun external-completion-table ( category lookup
                                   &optional metadata try-completion-function)
  "Make completion table using the `external' completion style.

The completion table produced foregoes any styles normally set in
`completion-styles' and will set up an entry for the symbol
CATEGORY in `completion-category-defaults', linking it to the
special completion style `external'.

This style is useful when the caller interfaces with an external
tool that provides completions.  This may be a shell utility, an
inferior process, an http server, etc.  The external tool does
the matching, and the full set of candidates doesn't need to be
transferred to Emacs's address space.  This often results in much
faster overall completion at the expense of the choice of
completion styles.

LOOKUP is a function taking a string PATTERN and a position POINT.
The function should contact the backend and return a list
of strings representing the candidates matching PATTERN given
that POINT is the location of point within it.  LOOKUP decides if
PATTERN is interpreted as a substring, a regular expression, or
any other type of matching key.  Strings returned by LOOKUP may
be propertized with `completions-common-part' to illustrate the
specific interpretation.  To maintain responsiveness in the face
of all but the spiffiest external tools, LOOKUP should detect
timeouts and pending user input with `while-no-input' or
`sit-for' (which see), cancel the request (if that is possible)
and immediately return any non-list.

Calls to LOOKUP are cached.  There is no option to flush the cache,
so if you need to do it, create a new completion table by calling
`external-completion-table' again.


CATEGORY is a symbol that should identify the kind of things
being completed, so users can refer to it in `completion-category-override'.
METADATA is an alist of additional properties such as `cycle-sort-function'
to associate with CATEGORY.  This means that the caller may still
retain control the sorting of the candidates while the tool
controls the matching.

TRY-COMPLETION-FUNCTION is a function taking arguments
\(PATTERN POINT ALL-COMPLETIONS), where PATTERN
and POINT are as described above and ALL-COMPLETIONS are all
candidates previously gathered by LOOKUP.  It should return
a cons cell (NEWPATTERN . NEWPOINT) such that NEWPATTERN is
as long as possible within the constraints that LOOKUP still returns
the same set of candidates as it does for PATTERN and POINT.
This can only be provided if you happen to know what kind of
completion style is used by the external tool and is only worthwhile
to provide if that completion style is fairly simple:
if the tool is using something like \"flex\", it's probably useless."
  (unless (assq category completion-category-defaults)
    (push `(,category (styles external))
          completion-category-defaults))
  (let ((cache (make-hash-table :test #'equal)))
    (cl-flet ((lookup-internal (string point)
                (let* ((key (cons string point))
                       (probe (gethash key cache 'external--notfound)))
                  (if (eq probe 'external--notfound)
                      (puthash key (funcall lookup string point) cache)
                    probe))))
      (lambda (string pred action)
        (pcase action
          (`metadata
           `(metadata (category . ,category) . ,metadata))
          (`(external-completion--tryc . ,point)
           ;; FIXME: Obey `pred'?  Pass it to `try-completion-function'?
           `(external-completion--tryc
             . ,(if try-completion-function
                    (funcall try-completion-function
                             string
                             point
                             (lookup-internal string point))
                  (cons string point))))
          (`(external-completion--allc . ,point)
           (let ((all (lookup-internal string point)))
             `(external-completion--allc
               . ,(if pred (cl-remove-if-not pred all) all))))
          (`(boundaries . ,_) nil)
          ('lambda t) ;; `test-completion' should assume all results are valid.
          (_method
           ;; FIXME: I suspect many external backends can't make much use of
           ;; POINT, in which case the call below may actually be equivalent
           ;; to one that's already in cache but we will fail to reuse it
           ;; just because POINT is different :-(
           (let ((all (lookup-internal string (length string))))
             ;; This is here for two reasons:
             ;;
             ;; * for when users customize `completion-category-overrides'
             ;;   to access this table with a non-`external' completion style.
             ;;   It won't work very well for styles more complex than PCM,
             ;;   but it should work fine for prefix completion.
             ;;
             ;; * for when `_method' above can also be `nil' or `lambda'
             ;;   which has some semantics and use I don't fully
             ;;   understand.  It doesn't seem to do anything very
             ;;   useful in my tests, but since we have caching it
             ;;   doesn't seem to hurt much either.
             (complete-with-action action all string pred))))))))

;; Note: the "tryc", "allc" suffixes are made akward on purpose, so
;; it's easy to pick them apart from the jungle of combinations of
;; "try" and "all" and "completion" that inhabit Emacs's completion
;; logic.
(defun external-completion--call (op string table pred point)
  (when (functionp table)
    (let ((res (funcall table string pred (cons op point))))
      (when (eq op (car-safe res))
        (cdr res)))))

(defun external-completion--try-completion (string table pred point)
  (external-completion--call 'external-completion--tryc
                             string table pred point))

(defun external-completion--all-completions (string table pred point)
  (external-completion--call 'external-completion--allc
                             string table pred point))

(provide 'external-completion)
;;; external-completion.el ends here