Re: Predict-on and colored/higlighted predicted text

["Bart Schaefer" <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Jan 26,  1:43am, Clifford Caoile wrote:
}
} I have been exploring the 4.0.x functionality called "predict-on" and
} "predict-off". It has been both a gee-wiz and a oh-darn experience

Yes, that was pretty much my experience, even while writing it.  If you
haven't looked at the styles related to predictive typing, I suggest you
do so ("man zshcontrib"), and perhaps try these settings:

zstyle :predict verbose yes
zstyle :predict cursor key
zstyle ':completion:predict:*' completer \
	_oldlist _complete _ignored _history _prefix

I was going to suggest using the "toggle" style as well, but you'd better
apply the appended patch first or you'll be saying "oh darn" even more.

zstyle :predict toggle yes

} Also it reminds me of recent capabilities found in Windows such
} as auto complete in Internet Explorer and Visual Studio 6.

That was the intention.  If you want a different style of auto completion,
have a look at incremental-complete-word.

} I was wondering how far this prediction can be graphically enhanced?

Not very far, I'm afraid.

} Would it be possible to color code or highlight or underscore the part
} of the line that is filled in by prediction?

Unfortunately the zsh line editor does not provide a way to insert into
the command line any characters that are not actually part of the command.
On a text terminal, the way highlighting/underscoring/etc. is done is by
sending "invisible" characters to the terminal that cause it to change
the appearance of whatever follows.  So without some fairly large changes
to ZLE, colorizing parts of the command is not possible.

However, it's always the case that everything to the right of the cursor
is the part filled in by prediction, so there is that much of a cue.

With some of the recent enchancements to history search in zsh-4.1.x-dev,
it might be possible to have a single keystroke search multiple times and
generate a listing of all the possible hits (a bit like the droplist that
appears below the Address: bar when auto-completing in IE).  I'm not sure
how usable that would be in practice, though.

Here's the patch I mentioned:

Index: Functions/Zle/predict-on
===================================================================
--- predict-on	9 Apr 2001 20:14:12 -0000	1.1.1.1
+++ predict-on	25 Jan 2003 20:18:23 -0000
@@ -55,7 +55,8 @@
     ((++CURSOR))
   else
     LBUFFER="$LBUFFER$KEYS"
-    if [[ $LASTWIDGET == (self-insert|magic-space|backward-delete-char) ]]
+    if [[ $LASTWIDGET == (self-insert|magic-space|backward-delete-char) ||
+	  $LASTWIDGET == (complete-word|accept-*|predict-*) ]]
     then
       if ! zle .history-beginning-search-backward
       then

-- 
Bart Schaefer                                 Brass Lantern Enterprises
http://www.well.com/user/barts              http://www.brasslantern.com

Zsh: http://www.zsh.org | PHPerl Project: http://phperl.sourceforge.net