Please add more doc: asynchronous completion

[gpotter2]

Hello,
I'm currently replacing our pyreadline auto completion by the one of prompt-toolkit.
(secdev/scapy#703)

In our implementation, we encapsulate the code.interact function, which acts like a python shell, in which we use the prompt function.

Auto completion is working great, but is slow. There's some obscure functions in the doc: http://python-prompt-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/stable/pages/reference.html#prompt_toolkit.buffer.Buffer.start_completion, which made me feel that this could be speed-up... am I right ?

If so i got several questions:

• What is the Future class that all doc talks about ?!
• It's written here that it's located in prompt_toolkit.eventloop.future.Future, which does not seem to exist...
• How do we implement asynchronous completion ? There are no examples for that :/

The project's great ! Great work

Thanks !

[jonathanslenders]

This is weird. It looks like readthedocs took the documentation of the 2.0 branch.
2.0 got both asynchronous+synchronous autocompletion, auto suggestion and input validation.

For the 1.0 version (master branch), autocompletion is always asynchronous (running in a background thread), unless readline-style completions are used (press Tab to trigger completion).

Currently, there is nothing special you have to do to get asynchronous autocompletion. Just pass the Completer instance. Know that Completer.get_completions is called in a background thread, and the completions are displayed when that function call finishes.

[jonathanslenders]

By the way, thanks for pointing this out!
Check the documentation here: http://python-prompt-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/master/
Let me know if you have some questions. When 2.0 is ready, it will have much more documentation (give it maybe half a year).

[gpotter2]

Ok thanks for the info ! My only next question is about #519.