Completion on word prefix only (tcsh-style)

Completion on word prefix only (tcsh-style)

[Steve Talley]

Hi,

Is there an option to force zsh to only look at a prefix on
completion?  This seems to be the default in tcsh, but I can't get it
to work for zsh.

Example:

Suppose there is a lone file blah.txt in the current dir:

% ls
./     ../    blah.txt

If I hit [TAB] in the following example, with the cursor over the first
x, I get a beep and no completion.

% ls blxxx
       ^

In tcsh, however, it completes to:

% ls blah.txt xxx
              ^

And keeps the cursor over the first x.  Basically what tcsh does is
assume that the word suffix (anything after the cursor) is a different
word, and just completes on the word prefix.  Is there a way to get zsh
to do this too?

BTW, the COMPLETE_IN_WORD option sounded good but didn't do the trick.

Thanks,

Steve

Re: Completion on word prefix only (tcsh-style)

[Peter Stephenson]

> Is there an option to force zsh to only look at a prefix on
> completion?  This seems to be the default in tcsh, but I can't get it
> to work for zsh.

The command is called expand-or-complete-prefix.  If you bind it to
tab, you will probably get something like tcsh behaviour.

> BTW, the COMPLETE_IN_WORD option sounded good but didn't do the trick.

That's for when you've got something in the middle of the word
missing, i.e. both the prefix and the suffix count but with insertion
at point instead of the end.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@ifh.de>       Tel: +39 50 911239
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/
Gruppo Teorico, Dipartimento di Fisica
Piazza Torricelli 2, 56100 Pisa, Italy

Re: Completion on word prefix only (tcsh-style)

[Steve Talley]

> > Is there an option to force zsh to only look at a prefix on
> > completion?  This seems to be the default in tcsh, but I can't get it
> > to work for zsh.
> 
> The command is called expand-or-complete-prefix.  If you bind it to
> tab, you will probably get something like tcsh behaviour.

This appeared to work initially, but now completion for "cd" doesn't
work beyond the first directory level:

With expand-or-complete-prefix:

% cd /etc/[TAB]

produces no matches.

With expand-or-complete, it works fine:

% cd /etc/[TAB]
acct/      fn/        lp/        rc2.d/     snmp/
cron.d/    fs/        mail/      rc3.d/     tm/
default/   http/      net/       rcS.d/     uucp/
dfs/       inet/      openwin/   saf/
dhcp/      init.d/    opt/       security/
dmi/       lib/       rc0.d/     skel/
dt/        log@       rc1.d/     ski/

I'm using the simple completion

compctl -g '*(-/)' cd

Is this a bug?

Thanks,

Steve