Re: completer that first expands global aliases (Re: dsf)

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Jan 8,  9:29pm, Daniel wrote:
} Subject: Re: completer that first expands global aliases  (Re: dsf)
}
} >     zstyle -e ':completion:most-recent-*::::' completer \
} > 	'compprefuncs=(_expand_alias) reply=(_menu _complete _match)'
} 
} Ah, I understand how this is supposed to work; both your examples. Though,
} neither of them does work. I have to press ^Xm twice, first to expand my DL,
} and a second time to get a first file match.

I think you're never going to get precisely the behavior you want, because
aliases have to be entire words.  For example, if without using completion
at all you gave the command

	ls DL*

the DL would not expand, so you would not see a listing of the files in
the ~/dl/ directory.  Completion is going to have the same issue; the
alias has to expand as a word of its own before zsh can discover that it
is a directory that can contain files to match.

I think what you really want is a named directory, although you still
have to type a leading tilde and trailing slash (e.g. ~DL/) to refer to
files within one.  With a named directory, completion should "just work"
without having to first expand the abbreviation to the path to which it
refers.

    % hash -d DL=~/dl
    % ls ~DL/<TAB>

Of course if your directory is really named "dl" that's not saving you
very much.

If that won't do, then the way to get the closest to what you want is
to write a widget that modifies the words array and updates $PREFIX
before calling the _main_complete function.  You may be able to do this
by cribbing from _expand_alias.