Re: Funky list-colors

[Oliver Kiddle <okiddle@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sebastian Gniazdowski wrote:
> This seems a less powerful than the hacky printable-LS_COLORS idea,
> which I overall like. From experience, such things often result in
> unpredictable and highly surprising + valuable solutions. Maybe it's
> worth opening this door? In a most optimistic scenario, the code would
> have to do a few isprints???

Such things also often result in weird bugs and broken feature
combinations if they haven't been thought through properly.

In this particular case, list-colors can take a form with just an
equals sign (`=') followed by a pattern. The pattern is matched
against the entire display string to specify colouring. But all the
work related to ensuring column alignment has already been done at
this stage. If you add extra visible characters, you may need to
change the alignment but it is too late for that.

As Bart mentioned there are already ways to define the exact form
of completion display strings. So this wouldn't even add anything
other than perhaps an easier configuration hook. If anyone has
specific ideas for cases where extra decoration on matches would
be useful, then patches to the relevant completion functions would
be welcome.

Oliver