Re: PATCH: Re: Saving the zle display stuff

[Oliver Kiddle <opk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sven Wischnowsky wrote:
> 
> Oliver Kiddle wrote:

> > I seem to have some fairly long option exclusion lists in some of my
> > completions so it might also be worth thinking if there are any better
> > ways of doing the completion when there are separate forms of the
> > command. I experimented with a few things like using two calls to
> > _arguments without much success.
> 
> Yep. Any suggestions? ;-)

I've got some ideas but I'm not sure how workable they would be.

First, I suppose we would need some syntax to divide the arguments to
_arguments into separate groups. At a simple level, you could say that
each group defined the options for a separate form of the command and
use something like '--' to separate the groups. The main additional
functionality that this would offer over the current situation is that
you could define separate non-option arguments (*:... or n:...) for each
group.

Many commands will have some options which are common to their different
forms though so a syntax which allows groups to be labelled and excluded
as a whole would avoid any repetition in the arguments. So for example,
you might have:

_arguments -C \
  '(form2 form3)form1:' \
    '-e:files:_files' \
  '(form1 form3)form2:' \
    '(-f)-a: ...
    '-e:...:_users' \
    '(-a -r)-f: ...
  '(common form1 form2)form3:' \
    '-l: ...
    '*:users:_users' \
  '(form3)common:' \
    '(-f)-r: ...
    '*:files:_files'

Here, I have used the labels form1, form2, form3 and common. Hopefully
the syntax is clear; there may be better ways of representing it. Here
the command would have 3 forms. The first two have separate parameters
which are defined in their respective groups (form1 has the -e option
and form2 has a -a, -f and a different -e option). They both share the
arguments defined in the common group (a -r option and files being
completed ordinarily). The third form of the command just has a -l
option - it doesn't use anything from the common group. In addition it
completes users ordinarily. The -e option raises one issue because there
are two different definitions - in form1 and form2. Initially, both
users and files would be completed after -e but if at any point a -a or
-f option was used, only users (form2) would be completed. There would
be a similar situation initially for the '*:... arguments. Anything
which excluded (*) would exclude both (would there be a problem with
this?).

In summary, this is grouping the arguments and using common exclusion
lists for the groups and allowing the groups to exclude other whole
groups. You could easily expand the above to have longer exclusion lists
and use the current syntax (although you couldn't deal with two -e and
two * definitions).

Does this make sense? Is this suggestion far too complicated?

Finally, thanks Sven for that solution for command-completion taking
ages problem. That works very nicely thanks.

Oliver Kiddle