It is a "feature" of other completion tools that differentiate between the selected candidate (usually the highlighted one) and the current input (which may be incomplete, and usually not what you want to select, but sometimes is (e.g. when you want an empty string, or to choose something that is not a candidate but similar to one e.g. with fuzzy matching)). That happens with helm and ivy, probably selectrum, and other backends that try to improve on the vanilla completing-read interface.
 
John

-----------------------------------
Professor John Kitchin (he/him/his)
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803


On Mon, Dec 6, 2021 at 1:42 PM Daniel Nemenyi <daniel@pompo.co> wrote:

Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> wrote (on Mon 06 Dec 2021 17:58):

> The prompt displays : "" to exit, which means you have to select the
> empty value to exit. How you do select that value depends on the
> completion UI.
>
> I admit it is not particularly clear. Maybe we should spell out the
> "empty value" part of the prompt.

I sort of got that -- though I must admit I did try entering two double quotes just in case! -- but the issue is that it's not clear how one inserts an empty value.

Couldn't the top value one could select simply be ""? Or is this just a problem with helm?