Help with completion-styles and orderless

Hi everyone! I am an Emacs newbie, using it now for \~2months, and I am still with my mouth open everyday on how amazing it is. Thanks to all the people that have worked hard on Emacs and also plugin creators!!! I have created my own config from scratch after having used Doom briefly and Prelude extensively. This is working far better, and it's teaching me a lot. On a side note, I would really appreciate feedback into how this config can be improved, best practices, better choices, etc. See my config here: [https://github.com/averageflow/dotfiles/tree/master/joeTumbleweedIKEADell/emacs](https://github.com/averageflow/dotfiles/tree/master/joeTumbleweedIKEADell/emacs) I use a variety of packages, including consult, marginalia, vertico, corfu and orderless, use-package with straight. I love orderless, and when I manually enable it, works wonderful, but for some reason, it doesn't get properly activated in my setup (init.el) when following the documentation: (use-package orderless :custom (setq completion-styles '(orderless basic) completion-category-overrides '((file (styles basic partial-completion)))) ) When I do (print completion-styles) it gives me just (basic). Somehow it gets overriden I think ? I've also tried to change that :custom by :config and to use the setq outside the use-package block, to no avail. So I have had to resort to (custom-set-variables '(completion-styles '(orderless basic)) ) And this seems to work. But how can I / should I get rid of it this way? Why doesn't it work in the use-package declaration? Thanks!

The syntax for a`:custom` section is wrong, see below. And it likely does not work with `:config` because by default `use-package` does lazy loading, and the `orderless` package is not loaded in your case. You can explicitly load a package with `:demand t`. The below should work: (use-package orderless :demand t :custom (completion-styles '(orderless basic)) (completion-category-overrides '((file (styles basic partial-completion))))) Note that with orderless before basic in the completion style the basic tab completion will not work. You can reverse the order to keep tab completion. It won't be a problem with orderless as as soon as you use a complex query it won't be a prefix and orderless will still kick in. So I'd recommend `'(basic orderless)` instead.

What are major differences between fido-vertical-mode and vertico?

Thanks for explaining, will soon try

Thanks for your tip, but it still gives the same result..

> When I do (print completion-styles) Slight off-topic, but I recommend using Emacs' built-in help system instead of printing the values of variables, i.e. `C-h v` then enter `completion-styles`. This includes a lot more information (default value, current value, documentation) and useful information like > Note that `completion-category-overrides` may override these styles for specific categories, such as files, buffers, etc. so maybe inspect that variable too.

The quickest option to me is changing `custom` to `init`.

Correction, `use-package` does [_not_ lazy load by default](https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package/#notes-about-lazy-loading), _unless_ there are autoloaded things included in the block (`:commands`, `:bind`, `:mode`, ...). None of those things are present here.

Suggestion: get it to work without `use-package` first. Then, after it's doing what you want using just Emacs-Lisp, you can rewrite it using the use-package macro's keywords. In this way, you'll have a better understanding of exactly what you're trying to get use-package to do before translating that intent into the more abstracted syntax of use-package's various keywords. There are basically 2 things you want to happen. You want the "orderless.el" package to get loaded, and you want the `completion-styles` list to be set so that `orderless` will be the first element (or at least so that it will be one of the elements). Simplest way to get orderless.el loaded is to put `(require 'orderless)` in your init file. You can check that it has loaded by evaluating `(featurep 'orderless)` (which will return `t` if it has). You can set `completion-styles` using the `customize-set-variable` function. Note that this is different from `custom-set-variables` which you used above. I would advise against using that, because the "Customize" interface saves its settings in the `custom-set-variables` block, and it expects there to only be one of them. So you may encounter unpleasant surprises if you create that block yourself.

What about using it with straight.el ?