Re: Completion script for the ctags program

[Aaron Schrab <aaron@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 16:08 -0600 03 Mar 2021, Jacob Gelbman <gelbman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Just I don’t think it should add all the options that it could be 
> because it would make the output too long to read. I can’t think of 
> another command that has options like this,

One example would be ack (AKA ack-grep) which also has options for quite 
a few programming languages.  Although in its case there isn't any 
common prefix for the options to turn on a language; it's just options 
like `ack --python`.  It also supports options like `ack --nopython` to 
disable languages.

The completion for that *does* include all of those options. Yes, all of 
that does make it quite verbose, but that can also be the case even 
without that type of dynamic option names (I'm mainly thinking of curl 
here).  I still think that having the completion options actually usable 
as-is is still better than requiring the user to edit the completion 
results. It would likely be even better in this case if the language 
portion could be treated more as the argument to an option, and so the 
language list would only be presented after the prefix was already 
selected.

But I'd also say that even a completion script which generates those 
options in need of editing would still be an improvement over nothing.