Text Editor Filename Completion

Text Editor Filename Completion

[Chris Johnson]

In my haste I often end up opening a binary file or a file that doesn't
exist because the completer completes up to the beginning of the
extension (e.g., "vi mytex." when mytex.tex and mytex.pdf exist).

Does anyone have any completion commands set up for vi or emacs that
give preference to plain text files -- those containing source code --
rather than the shorter executable file name?  I've tried a few things
to have .c, .tex, .pl, and so on favored when vi is the executable, but
I'm not too satisfied with my work.

Thanks for any suggestions!

-- 
Chris Johnson
cjohnson@cs.utk.edu
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~cjohnson

Re: Text Editor Filename Completion

[Peter Stephenson]

Chris Johnson wrote:
> In my haste I often end up opening a binary file or a file that doesn't
> exist because the completer completes up to the beginning of the
> extension (e.g., "vi mytex." when mytex.tex and mytex.pdf exist).
> 
> Does anyone have any completion commands set up for vi or emacs that
> give preference to plain text files -- those containing source code --
> rather than the shorter executable file name?  I've tried a few things
> to have .c, .tex, .pl, and so on favored when vi is the executable, but
> I'm not too satisfied with my work.

Assuming you're using the new completion system, you can arrange the
file-patterns style appropriately.  For example,

zstyle ':completion:*:*:(emacs|vi):*' file-patterns \
    '*.(c|h|pl|tex|txt):globbed-files *(-/):directories' '*:all-files'

The best description of this is on page 398 of From Bash to Zsh, by
Oliver who may have a more comprehensive answer.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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Re: Text Editor Filename Completion

[Bart Schaefer]

On Mar 11,  1:10pm, Peter Stephenson wrote:
} Subject: Re: Text Editor Filename Completion
}
} > Does anyone have any completion commands set up for vi or emacs that
} > give preference to plain text files -- those containing source code --
} 
} zstyle ':completion:*:*:(emacs|vi):*' file-patterns \
}     '*.(c|h|pl|tex|txt):globbed-files *(-/):directories' '*:all-files'

How about this:

  textfiles() {
    reply=( ${${(@M)${(f)"$(file $REPLY 2>/dev/null)"}\:#*text*}%:*} )
  }
  zstyle ':completion:*:*:(emacs|vi|vim):*' file-patterns \
    '%p(e,textfiles,):globbed-files *(-/):directories' '*:all-files' 

(I found that I needed the "|vim" in there because vi is aliased to vim
on my system and the alias is expanded before the completion context is
established [unless you setopt completealiases]).