Re-use code from company

[hexmode]

It seems like the retrieval and display code from this could be re-used.

Screencast.From.2025-10-03.16-31-50.mp4

[huangfeiyu]

could you share some code? I would like to know how you use these functions. other guys told me they reuse the functions for org mode links. in the near future, I will make some functions generic so them can be used easily.

[hexmode]

Here is a minimal init.el to get this behavior:

(use-package company
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/company-mode/company-mode" :rev :newest)
  :hook (emacs-lisp-mode . company-mode)
  :custom
  (setq company-idle-delay 0.3))

(add-to-list 'package-archives '("MELPA" . "https://melpa.org/packages/"))
(use-package frame-local
  :ensure t)
(use-package company-box
  :after frame-local
  :ensure t
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/sebastiencs/company-box" :rev :newest)
  :hook (company-mode . company-box-mode))

If you create a directory ~/tmp-emacs and put this in it as init.el, you can then see this behavior when you run emacs --init-directory=~/tmp-emacs/ ~/tmp-emacs/init.el.

Screencast.From.2025-10-04.13-27-56.mp4

[hexmode]

The screencasts demonstrates a bug where the initial company box doesn't show up. It should look like this:

[huangfeiyu]

but in your configuration, I don't see eldoc-mouse, where should the configuration of eldoc-mouse be?

[hexmode]

I'm sorry my issue wasn't clear. Let me re-state it.

It seems like a lot of what you are doing (displaying documentation in a frame) could be use existing code. Here, I've demonstrated how company-box does something similar to what you're doing, but without the mouse-hovering.

I haven't looked closely at your project so I could be wrong or you could already be doing what I'm suggesting.

[huangfeiyu]

@hexmode so this isn't an issue. We may move it to Discussion? In my implementation, I don't write code to retrieve document, I call Emacs function eldoc-print-current-symbol-info to tell Emacs to retrieve doc, I don't even deal with when to display doc, emacs does, what I do here is telling emacs where and how to display document (show the doc in posframe). You can see that I just wrote few code to support the function.
company-box invented its own way to use child frame, it doesn’t use package posframe, so it must be much complicated. I am not sure if it also display the doc from lsp sever, though I saw in your screen shot, it display the doc for elisp.

Correct myself, company-boc does support displaying the doc from lsp server, I do not fully understand how it get the doc, it seems that company-box get doc from company.

Anyway, eldoc-mouse trigger emacs build-in eldoc to get doc from lsp server, eldoc decide when to output doc, eldoc-mouse tells eldoc how and where to display doc. The approaches used by company-box and eldoc-mouse are different, and the situations are different. And I don't write much code to retrieve doc, display doc in eldoc-mouse, instead, I reused emacs's build-in eldoc and elpa package posframe.

[hexmode]

A discussion is probably appropriate. I haven't used them much and mostly use issues.

Thanks for letting me know how you're doing this. Maybe I should ask company-box why they don't use posframe. 😉

[huangfeiyu]

@hexmode By the way, I discovered another package called company-quickhelp which display doc of the candidates of the company, just like company-box, but it is much smaller, about 200 lines code.