Sometimes it just takes a little thing to make your day.

I have been using company-mode for ages, becoming accustomed to the list of candidates popping up whenever the automatic completion kicks in.

However, more often than not what I need is in-buffer, context-aware completion, and in this case dabbrev-expand or dabbrev-completion, which I have bound to C-, and C-. respectively, are enough.

It’s pretty simple to turn off company-mode automatic completion:

(setq company-idle-delay nil)

That’s it.

To get the list of candidates back when I need, I have company-complete bound to C-c c .

Nice and easy.