Feature: highlight active region in vertico-buffer-mode's minibuffer

[hab25]

Reproduced with emacs -Q:

• Make sure vertico is in the load-path, then eval the following

(progn
  (require 'vertico-buffer)
  (vertico-mode)
  (vertico-buffer-mode))

• Do M-x, type some word and try selecting some amount of chars e.g., with C-S-<left>.
• See that the region is not highlighted (but is still there; e.g., try <backspace>)

Note: the highligting starts working again after one mouse-clicks on the vertico buffer.

Vertico version 1.4 from GNU ELPA.

[minad]

Thanks for the report. I've also observed this before. I've migrated the issue to an "Ideas" discussion since it is essentially a missing feature.

For some reason transient-mark-mode doesn't highlight the active region in another window. In its current implementation, vertico-buffer-mode duplicates the minibuffer. The minibuffer is still shown in the miniwindow (but hidden) and also in the separate large window. To demonstrate this, you can set vertico-buffer-hide-prompt to nil, such that the original minibuffer window content stays visible.

I have not found a simple solution so far to also replicate the marked region in the separate window. I think one somehow has to copy the transient-mark-mode state to the other window. Patches implementing this feature are welcome.

[hab25]

Thank you for the maintenance. Does Vertico provide an easy way of having Vertico UI to display at the top of the frame ¹ while having this feature of highlighting the active region?

I tried the following alternatives, but they did not meet my needs: vertico-posframe also doesn't have this feature (tumashu/vertico-posframe#31), mini-frame suffers from two dealbreaker bugs/annoyances: muffinmad/emacs-mini-frame#67 and muffinmad/emacs-mini-frame#25

Footnotes

1. like vertico-buffer with (setopt vertico-buffer-display-action `(display-buffer-in-side-window (window-height . ,(+ 3 vertico-count)) (side . top))) ↩

[hab25]

Many popular desktop programs, such as Chromium, GNOME, and VSCode, have their "minibuffer" at the top of the frame by default; I expect that Emacs newcomers would appreciate vertico-buffer-mode being a more featureful experience.

[minad]

Not as far as I know. Our best bet is to improve vertico-buffer-mode accordingly.

[minad]

Implemented in 996d122.