Re: tab completion sort by modification time

[Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>]

On Sat, 10 Jan 2015 14:33:49 -0500
kamaraju kusumanchi <raju.mailinglists@gmail.com> wrote:
> Long time bash user here. Looking to see if zsh can solve my
> particular problem. If it does, I'd like to switch to it.
> 
> Say  a directory contains a lot of files and say I am only interested
> in the files that were recently edited/created. When doing a tab
> completion inside this directory, I would like the files to be listed
> in the order of modification time (similar to ls -rt). This way the
> latest files show up at the end and I can easily copy/paste their
> names using mouse onto the command line.
>
> Is zsh tab completion system comprehensive enough to do something like this?

I'm assuming as a bash user you're not subscribed to zsh-users...

If you want this behaviour globally, I think it's as simple as the
following piece of configuration:

zstyle ':completion:*' file-sort modification

If you want more control, reading the zshcompsys manual page should give
you ideas of how to modify that first argument --- which is a pattern
matching the context in which a completion occurs --- should give you
some ideas how to do so.

It's also relatively straightforward (i.e someone here can work out
how to do it in a few minutes after you've scratched your head for
half an hour:-)) to add a new key binding that has this file completion
behaviour.

pws