Can literal prefixes be privileged in counsel-find-file ordering?

Question

After many years of living in vanilla Emacs, I am playing with souping things up a bit, and trying out ivy/counsel.

I'm finding the experience of counsel-find-file a bit jarring, because it does not tab me where my years of muscle memory expect to tab, or really where I think is preferable.

For example, I have directories

~/development/contrib-git/ # projects not mine I contribute to
~/development/gitproj/     # projects mostly mine

When I type ~/development/git<tab>, I'd expect it to tab into gitproj, but in fact, the regex-based completion list shows contrib-git first, so often I find myself unwantedly there.

I've tried modifying ivy-initial-inputs-alist to place a ^ prefix automatically into counsel-find-files, but this doesn't help, it only places that at the beginning of the full path, not at the beginning of each element. I can manually type ^ at the beginning of each element, but that's not so fluid.

And I don't at all mind the much richer completion list! I just want, for each path segment, the first item in the completion ordering, the one I'll tab into if I don't navigate downwards, to be the one containing the prefix I have actually typed.

Is there any way to configure this?

Many thanks!

Answer 1

The following combination of modifications seems to have given me just what I want: tab completion according to prefix (as my muscle memory expects from shelling and vanilla emacs), while keeping a rich menu of completions I can navigate to in the minibuffer if I choose to.

The ordering I want came from

(straight-use-package 'prescient)
(straight-use-package 'ivy-prescient)
(require 'prescient)
(require 'ivy-prescient)
(setq prescient-filter-method '(literal-prefix literal regexp initialism fuzzy)) ;; cribbed and combined from various examples
(ivy-prescient-mode)

The ability to <tab>-<tab>-<tab> harmlessly without entering into a file or dired buffer unintentionally came from

(define-key ivy-minibuffer-map (kbd "TAB") 'ivy-partial) ;; don't open anything until I hit return please!

I'll need a few days to live with this setup and see how it goes, but it looks like this gives me what I want — the rich ivy completion menus, but tab behavior that won't require me to overcome years of muscle memory.