Re: tilde featuritis alert

[Gert-Jan Vons <vons@ocegr.fr>]

Decklin Foster wrote:

>I'm sure this has come up before, but being a relative rc newbie, I
>really miss my '~' for home directory from bash. my question is, what
>exactly is the pattern matching '~' in rc *good* for? can't you just
>use 'switch' and end up with more readable code? couldn't we call it
>'match'? is the lack of an sh-like '~' a personal preference of the
>author, or just not feasible to implement due to rc's eval-once
>semantics?

Something like "if (~ a b || ~ c d)" becomes quite messy when you only
have 'switch'.

>I know i probably ought to be quiet and retrain my fingers, but old
>habits die hard. if i can't patch rc for this, how can i set up
>readline to get along with it? my problem is that readline will do tab
>completion on ~/wwwd<TAB> if i have a directory in my home called
>wwwdocs. but it *won't* do anything with $home/wwwd<TAB>, presumably
>since rc is not telling it what's in $home.

I doubt you will see tilde expansion in rc anytime soon, since it doesn't 
go with the philosophy behind the shell (just look at the debates over 
'echo' being built-in or not). The conflict with the ~ operator is 
another reason of course.

You can get rc to expand $home (or any other environment variable) when
you hit [tab] for filename completion by using the "vrl" commandline 
editor instead of readline.

I've been thinking and discussing a bit with other rc/vrl users about 
adding ~ expansion to the vrl command-line editor, but it ain't that 
simple since there's no easy way to know whether the user wants the ~ to 
be the ~ operator or not.

I now have the habit of typing $home/foo instead of ~/foo, or /home/user 
instead of ~user. Typing can be reduced by defining h=$home and using 
$h/foo, but I agree it is hard to change old habits :)

Something that I still haven't gotten used to even after 5-6 years of 
using rc is the need to quote command arguments if there's an equal sign 
like in "dd 'if=infile' 'of=outfile'". I once asked for an extension that 
would allow me to do "dd if\=infile of\=outfile" but that got killed 
pretty fast :-/


         Gert-Jan
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