#+TITLE: Ask for selection in emacs
#+DESCRIPTION: Something I came across

I came across an email on one of the emacs mailing lists today, where
someone asked how to ask a user for input whilst providing
completions. The first answer he got was to try ~tmm-prompt~, so I
looked into it a little.

I use ~mu4e~ as my primary email program, but since it isn't designed
(seemingly) for use with multiple accounts I've got some wrapper
functions that set some variables according to my liking and then
start ~mu4e~. This works very well, but it's a pain to have to use
~M-x view-ryu-mail~ or ~M-x view-ninthfloor-mail~ and such, so I wrote
a function to read a string from the minibuffer, which I then bound to
the ~<XF86Mail>~ key, this turned it into, for example ~<XF86Mail>
ryu~ and ~<XF86Mail> ninthfloor~ and so on, but this doesn't have any
completion or notification of my options.

So after looking at ~tmm-prompt~ I came up with the following:

#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
(defvar oni:mailbox-map
  '(("ryulash.org" . "ryu")
    ("ninthfloor" . "ninthfloor"))
  "A mailbox map for use with `tmm-prompt'.")

(defun view-ryu-mail ()...)
(defun view-ninthfloor-mail ()...)

(defun view-mu ()
  (interactive)
  (let* ((tmm-completion-prompt "Choose a mailbox\n")
         (inbox (tmm-prompt oni:mailbox-map)))
    (funcall (intern (concat "view-" inbox "-mail")))))
#+END_SRC

I've left out the definitions and some mail accounts for brevity.

~tmm-prompt~ is usually used when using the text-mode menu with ~M-`~,
but it works very well here too. This changes mailbox selection to,
for example ~<XF86Mail> r~ or ~<XF86Mail> n~.