Re: Redirection Symbol After Completion

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Jul 8, 12:44pm, Peter Stephenson wrote:
} Subject: Re: Redirection Symbol After Completion
}
} Chris Johnson wrote:
} > I personally find commands easier to parse with my eye when the space
} > remains before the redirection symbol:
} > 
} >    cat file.txt |
} > 
} > Is there any way to force this space to persist even if I type a
} > redirection operator?
} 
} It's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to configure, but
} unfortunately I don't think it's possible to do this without some
} tweaking of the completion system.

Skipping ahead a bit ...

}   echo testdir/
} 
} and now type "|".  The slash isn't removed, as it usually would be.
} That's because the same mechanism controls the characters removed when
} you have a suffix, including an automatically added /, and when you
} don't, i.e. you get the space in your original question.

Presumably he wants the slash replaced by a space in that instance.  I
think you're going about this the wrong way -- rather than revamping
how autoremoval occurs in the general case, adjust the way redirection
ops are inserted.

    self-insert-redir() {
        integer l=$#LBUFFER
	zle self-insert
	(( $l >= $#LBUFFER )) && LBUFFER[-1]=" $LBUFFER[-1]"
    }
    zle -N self-insert-redir
    for op in \| \< \> \&
    do bindkey "$op" self-insert-redir
    done

I like that so much I might even keep it.

It'd be nice if it were possible to test whether a suffix removal is
pending rather than checking the length of LBUFFER before and after
the self-insert, but I think this suffices (no pun intended).

One could go so far as to actually replace self-insert and also check
with a style for what constitutes a redirection operator, but that
gets a bit uglier.  I believe there was a discussion several months
ago about the problems caused by not being able to instruct zsh when
to use the ZLE_KEEPSUFFIX internal flag on a user-defined widget.
(Hmm, maybe that problem doesn't apply here anyway.)

--