Re: Inserting all completions

[Sven Wischnowsky <wischnow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bart Schaefer wrote:

> On Jul 19,  4:03pm, Danek Duvall wrote:
> > 
> > Hmmm, okay ... I don't want to replace completion with this entirely.  I'd
> > like to have two keystrokes -- one, tab, is the normal completion
> > mechanism.  The second, ^X^I or something, puts all the matches on the
> > line.
> 
> Just change the "compdef" in my previous example to:
> 
>   compdef -k _all expand-or-complete '^X^I'
> 
> This creates a binding that acts like expand-or-complete but that calls
> the function _all to generate the matches.
> 
> > The question then is, how to write function_to_compute_reply() in a
> > suitably generic manner ...
> 
> Hmm.  The existing Completions/*/* functions would be ideal for this, if
> there were some way to refer to "all the matches that have already been
> added by some other completer."  Unfortunately I've forgotten whether
> there is, and I can't find anything about it in the docs ... Sven?

I hadn't thought about this use, but I once suggested a way to access
the data for the matches already added.

Hm, I see two possibilities:

1) a way to get at the strings for the matches added
2) some more magic with compstate[insert]

Unfortunately 1) is not trivial:

- we really have the information about the matches only *after* the
  completion widget finished, because then the code that sorts the
  matches and eliminates duplicates is run; changing that would make
  adding matches much more expensive (checking for duplicates after
  each added match)
- the completion-inside-braces-problem: if we have a{b<TAB>, the
  matches are abx, aby, and so on and only the match-insertion code
  really knows where to re-insert the brace(s) correctly

Because of these two problems I haven't implemented something like
that yet.

The 2) is something I only thought about now. That wouldn't be too
hard, I think. We could make compstate[insert] accept a comma-
separated list of ranges or something like that (a la cut), e.g.:
`compstate[insert]=1-' would insert all matches, and something like
`compstate[insert]=1,3,5-10' would insert the first, third, and
fifth-to-tenth match (in that order).

We could also try to combine 1) and 2), i.e. a way to get at the
match-strings plus `compstate[insert]="($foo $bar)"' -- but that
wouldn't work with the braces-stuff.

Comments? Opinions?

Bye
 Sven


--
Sven Wischnowsky                         wischnow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx