help with multi string searches

[mooseyboots]

hi, thanks for this package.

i'm new to corfu (& orderless, vertico, embark, the whole family), so bear with me if this is old news. I've searched the repo for this issue, but not very well because it's unclear to me what to search for.

i'm struggling with multistring matching.

i know about corfu-separator, but i can't get it to work as i would like it to in elisp code.

my corfu config:

(use-package corfu
  :config
  (global-corfu-mode)
  (setq corfu-auto t))

my orderless:

(use-package orderless
  :ensure t
  :config
  ;; make spaces work:
  (setq completion-styles '(substring orderless basic)))

say i'm typing a call to a function in package mastodon:

(masto-

and it has five words in its name all separated by hyphens. i know the last or second last one, but not the intermediate terms (the first of which names the subpackage the function is in, and maybe i've forgotten that, or i just forget the word order of the name).

if i change corfu-separator to a hyphen (char 45) rather than a space, i'd hope to be able to type say

(masto-lastword

skipping the intermediate words. but it doesn't work, i get no candidates, whether i type - or insert it with M-SPC.

a concrete example:

(masto-get

returns "no match". but mastodon.el is huge and has many get functions, it's just that none of them start with masto-get.

(mastodon-get

ie. using the full package prefix, also doesn't work.

if i return the separator to the default space, and insert it using M-SPC, then it works:

(masto get

is there a clash between the separator and the function characters? i can't grok why there would be. i would even have thought that splitting terms by both hyphen and space should work.

---

another example that i understand less well:

I type C-x 8 RET, then type rh only. The sole candidate is RHINOCEROS, but i'm looking for Greek rho. I type o to make rho, and only then do all the rho candidates appear. Why does rh not match them? It seems to be because no candidate names begin with the letters rh, but why is that how the query works? If type C-x 8 RET M-SPC rh, then it works. This is really tricky, because it makes you think there are no results, not just that they aren't displaying but that they don't exist... A more generous, less parsimonious, matching style would be in order here. Is it possible to configure one simply?

Thanks for any pointers.

[jdtsmith]

You have substring before orderless in completion-styles. If the substring style produces matches, completion will not continue on to orderless. The first style to produce results wins; results are not combined.

Give (orderless basic) a try. You should also have a look at configuring orderless, as it can "act like" most other completion styles in situations you determine.

[mooseyboots]

thanks for the kind response. config of orderless it is!

removing substring from completion-styles and configuring orderless-matching-styles was what i needed to do.

apols for not knowing where to ask.