1.4 ecomplete

ecomplete is Emacs’s “electric completion”, and it is part of Emacs. It stores all information in an ecompleterc file, whose location, and name can be configured via the variable ecomplete-database-file (which see). The format of the file is:

((TYPE_1 ITEM_1 ITEM_2 ...)
 (TYPE_2 ITEM_N+1 ITEM_N+2 ...)
 ...)

That is, it is an alist map where the key is the type of match (so that you can have one list of things for “mail”, and one for, say, “mastodon”). In each of these sections you then have a list where each item is of the form:

(KEY TIMES-USED LAST-TIME-USED STRING)

When performing a query, the result will be all items where the search term matches all, or part of STRING.

When EUDC performs queries with ecomplete, the name of each attribute making up the query is used as the type in which the lookup is performed. The mapping from EUDC attribute names to ecomplete type names is performed according to the variable eudc-ecomplete-attributes-translation-alist (which see).