On Wed, May 04 2011, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> So at least cycling-completion seems fundamentally incompatible with
> this idea of abbrev-expansion-after-completion, at least if you want to
> allow arbitrarily complex abbrevs like skeletons.

Indeed, this is a real problem.

> Could you give me an idea of what kind of abbrevs the code should try
> to accommodate?

IIUC, your nic/nicolas example perfectly fits in. This is what I tried
to achieve in message-mode (using org-contacts as the database).

Maybe what's needed is a different completion type, which would be a
built on top of both completion and abbrev. It would try to complete
based on an abbrev list until there's no possible doubt about the alias
the users wants, and finally would do the expand-abbrev operation.

At least, that sounds like a completion mode we would need in
message-mode case.

-- 
Julien Danjou
❱ http://julien.danjou.info