It's become a standard feature of most (all?) software the past decade or two to have predictive text completion. By predictive completion I mean, when you type into the url field of a web browser it offers completion suggestions, or pretty much any search field, or write in a text messaging app, or an IDE like IntelliJ, or ... pretty much every piece of software I can think of, with one exception, which is Emacs. When I type into Emacs, nothing pops up and nothing is predicted.
Is this capability really missing from Emacs?
Searches turned up three packages that would need to be installed as add-ons and configured: autocomplete, company-mode, and corfu. Add-ons for completion? Really?
I went ahead and installed company-mode, but its behavior seems eccentric. For instance, the candidate lists often have duplicates. A search revealed this bug has existed for more than 5 years. Yet, company-mode seems to still be under active development. Count me baffled.
Also, the candidate lists seem not to be ordered in a logical way. Most of these systems are based on simple machine learning algorithms that would tend to put the more likely choices at the top. It doesn't seem to me that's happening with company-mode.
Also, the candidate list persists even after it's down to a unique choice, and it's awkward to dismiss. As I type it's constantly popping up with the unique completion of the word I'm typing, forcing me to constantly manually dismiss it. How did that make it out of beta? And it alters the letter case of candidate words in a way that makes many choices useless, for instance turning camel-case identifiers into all lower case. All this behavior strikes me as quite broken.
I honestly can't see why Emacs would need a special plug in for a feature this elementary. I'm not seeking anything esoteric or powerful, just basic text completion like any software of recent decades would have. I'm baffled by the seemingly broken functionality of company and I already invested a painful amount of time in it.
Can I expect anything more standard from autocomplete or corfu? Are there any other good options?