Re: completion of filenames

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2019-12-13 8:24 a.m., Peter Stephenson wrote:
> Well, you're welcome to do that, of course, but I can't help thinking
> you're shooting yourself in the foot.
I'll be quite prepared to abandon the idea if I get into trouble. Learn 
by doing tho.

> The system is designed to work
> out of the box; while you can make it do other things, obviously that
> implies you need some understanding of how it works before you can build
> it up yourself.  Your questions don't tend to suggest that's currently
> the case.  Background reading (such as Oliver's chapters in From Bash To
> Z Shell) and studying the documentation and the shell code itself are
> the first steps to getting there.
The completion documentation is overwhelming.  It would be a year of 
study to
understand it.  Without hints I have no chance.  If there is some 
tractable way of
getting what I'd like, that's great, if not, that's ok.  Bart and Dana 
recently showed
me how to complete local files even if the command finds no acceptable 
matches,
so what I'm asking for is sorta an expansion of that idea.

> If you're trying to get completion for suffix aliases going, the normal
> way to do this would be to assure yourself they work with a vanilla set
> up,

Yeah, that would be 90% of it, and since it should work, a forensic 
might be the way to
go, but for now  I'm still pursuing the possibility that any filename 
completion from the
beginning of a line might be doable.  If not then just as you say.

> then see what configuration of yours is stopping it working.  In my
> experience, this is generally more effective that telling people that
> what you've currently got doesn't work.
Well, I'd not say 'doesn't work' (except for suffix aliases) , it seems 
to be designed to
complete after a command.  If it can be tweaked to not require a command 
that's great.
But I must say, given what *can* be done, which is astonishing, asking 
for plain vanilla
completion without reference to a command would not seem like asking for 
the moon.
I'd expect it to  be simply a matter of skipping over the 'find command' 
part of completion.
Or not.  Anyway for now I don't even know where to look.