Re: Using the new completion system 'naked'

[DervishD <raul@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    Hi Bart, and thanks a lot for answering :)

>>     - Will the old 'compctl' completion system disabled in the
>> future? And if the answer is 'yes', when?
>The answers are "maybe, but probably not" and "nobody knows."

    Well, just as I supposed ;)

>>     - Can I use the new completion system without compinstall'ing it
>> and without compinit'ing it, just by suitably calling compadd,
>> compset and compcall (no compdef...)?
>Yes, of course you can.  The `compinit' system is only one of many that
>could be built on top of the compadd etc. builtins.  It just happens to
>be the best one we've come up with so far.

    The compinit sistem is very good, but I prefer doing it myself,
and BTW I don't really need such a powerful and complicated system.
I've tried to read '_arguments', but... well, you know ;)

>>     Moreover, if the answer is not very large: what advantages gives
>> the new completion mechanism over the old one?
>Depends on what you mean by "the new completion mechanism."

    Both 'compinit' system and the new builtins, as your answer
suggest. Thanks a lot for all the explanations :)))

>If you mean "the `compinit' system" then the answer is very large but
>mostly boils down to having more completions available out of the box,

    For me this is not an advantage, and that's the reason of my
question. But I must admit that for new users this is fantastic. All
the zsh contributors have done a very well job.

>If you mean the compadd/compset/etc. builtins only, plus `zle -C', then
>the advantage is meant to be that the syntax is less baroque

    OK, I was supposing. The syntax of compctl is not easy and
sometimes difficult to read, but I find it clearer, shorter and more
concise than most of the functions in the 'compinit' system. Just an
opinion ¿ok?, I'm not telling that the functions are badly written.

>more easily debugged

    This is true. Debugging of compctl can be very hard...

>One might observe that `_arguments' has become nearly as cryptic as
>`compctl', but on the other hand it's also doing a lot more work.

    I tread '_arguments' as some kind of gibberish ;))) I've read it
a couple of times (not deeply...) and I don't feel it readable...

    Well, I'm now pretty informed and more confident to make little
completions for compadd 'naked' just for the sake of doing it :)

    Thanks a lot, you're great, Bart :)
    Raúl