December 13, 2025
Nearly a couple of weeks since the last Bending Emacs episode, so here’s a new episode:
Bending Emacs Episode 8: completing-read
In this video, we take a look at the humble but mighty completing-read function. We can use it to craft our purpose-built tools, whether in pure elisp or to interact with command-line utilities.
Of interest, I also highlighted the great elisp-demos package, which extends your help buffers with sample snippets.
Here are some of the completing-read snippets we played with:
Pick a queen:
(completing-read "Pick a Queen: "
'("Queen of Hearts ♥"
"...December 13, 2025
Nearly a couple of weeks since the last Bending Emacs episode, so here’s a new episode:
Bending Emacs Episode 8: completing-read
In this video, we take a look at the humble but mighty completing-read function. We can use it to craft our purpose-built tools, whether in pure elisp or to interact with command-line utilities.
Of interest, I also highlighted the great elisp-demos package, which extends your help buffers with sample snippets.
Here are some of the completing-read snippets we played with:
Pick a queen:
(completing-read "Pick a Queen: "
'("Queen of Hearts ♥"
"Queen of Spades ♠"
"Queen of Clubs ♣"
"Queen of Diamonds ♦")
;; predicate
nil
;; require match
t)
Our own hashing function with an algo picker:
(defun misc/hash-region ()
(interactive)
(message "Hash: %s" (secure-hash (intern (completing-read
"Hash type: "
'(md5 sha1 sha224 sha256 sha384 sha512)))
(current-buffer)
(when (use-region-p)
(region-beginning))
(when (use-region-p)
(region-end)))))
A first look at integrating completing read with a CLI util:
(completing-read "Select file: "
(string-split (shell-command-to-string "ls -1 ../") "\n"))
Also got creative with BluetoothConnector on macOS and completing-read.
(completing-read "Toggle BT connection: "
(mapcar (lambda (device)
;; Extract device name
(nth 1 (split-string device " - ")))
(seq-filter
(lambda (line)
;; Keep lines like: af-8c-3b-b1-99-af - Device name
(string-match-p "^[0-9a-f]\\{2\\}" line))
(split-string (shell-command-to-string "BluetoothConnector") "\n"))))
Some of my completing-read uses:
Emacs: quickly killing processes.
Emacs: insert and render SF symbols.
macOS open with.
macOS set default app.
macOS share (the unhinged way).
ready-player search.
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