I threw this together to pretty much scrape some features I am hoping this repo eventually is capable of doing: https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-select/wiki/Roadmap

One of the the things I'm focused on right now is easy-to-customize data, access to internal data, and templates.

One concern is the ability to specify a custom list-item template (currently possible) and a custom selected template (not possible, just uses a button). Perhaps we should break this up into multiple tags?

<ui-select>
  <selected></selected>
  <options>
    <li ng-repeat="..."></li>
  </options>
</ui-select>

These child-directives COULD in fact be optional, and if not specified, simply generate <li><a>{{value}}</a></li>

Secondly, if you don't specify <selected> or <options> but you DO specify a template we could use THAT one for both. Perhaps instead of making you create the <li> tag and it's related attributes we can do it for you and you simply specify the contents of each list-item and the selected-item?