Re: Predict-on and colored/higlighted predicted text

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

I wrote:

} 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. [...] So without some fairly large changes to ZLE, colorizing
} parts of the command is not possible.

I was thinking about this, and it turns out it's not *quite* impossible,
but it does depend on redrawing behavior; so I'm not sure it will always
work, and it'd be really unpleasant over a slow connection.

Here's a small function that shows how to do it.  It highlights from the
cursor position to the end of the line, but it wouldn't be hard to
adapt to highlight any given section.

function hilite {
  setopt localoptions promptpercent
  local rbuffer="$RBUFFER"
  RBUFFER=""				# Truncate the buffer
  zle -R				# Redraw that much
  print -nP %U				# Begin highlight
  RBUFFER="$rbuffer"			# Restore the buffer
  zle -R				# Redraw the rest
  print -nP %u				# End highlight
}

However, as soon as you begin to edit the line, all bets are off as to
where the highlight remains (or doesn't).
__________

In that same message, I also wrote:

} ... perhaps try these settings:

I failed to cut'n'paste one that should have been included, to disable
menu selection when autocompleting.  If you don't have menu selection
enabled, you don't need this.

zstyle ':completion:predict:*' menu yes

There's probably a more clever setting of that for zsh-4.1.x-dev now
that menu selection has "interactive mode", but I haven't worked out
what it is.

-- 
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