On Thu, 21 Oct 2010 23:16:19 +0200, Sébastien Vauban <wxhgmqzgwmuf@spammotel.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Before spending a lot of time trying to choose for the "best" completion
> mechanism inside Emacs (and sticking to it), setting it up all the way
> through, I wanted to know if you had had:
> 
> - particularly good or bad experiences with one of the "standard" ones?

I've tried a number over the years.  I've yet to reach a situation
where I am particularly happy with any of them but the one that seems
to work best *for me* so far is hippie.

I have the following settings (having just added Tassilo's expansion
function for calc which is brilliant!):

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(setq hippie-expand-try-functions-list
      '(;;yas/hippie-try-expand
	th/my-try-complete-with-calc-result
        try-expand-all-abbrevs
	try-expand-dabbrev
        try-expand-dabbrev-all-buffers
        try-expand-dabbrev-from-kill
        try-complete-file-name
        try-complete-lisp-symbol))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

I no longer use yasnippets as they interfered too much with completion
in general.  

I have bound hippie-expand to C-; as I find this a lot easier to type
than M-/.  I also have TAB bound to the following:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(defun esf/indent-or-expand (arg)
  "Either indent according to mode, or expand the word preceding point."
  (interactive "*P")
  (if (and
       (or (bobp) (= ?w (char-syntax (char-before))))
       (or (eobp) (not (= ?w (char-syntax (char-after))))))
      ;;(dabbrev-expand arg)
      (hippie-expand arg)
    (indent-according-to-mode)))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

in most text buffers.  This means that TAB no longer does what it
should in org mode but I use C-i for that functionality as most of the
time I am typing text and not moving things around.

HTH,
eric