Re: completion is over thinking things.

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 2019-09-29 6:09 a.m., Mikael Magnusson wrote:
>
> Claiming that completion not completing invalid arguments for your
> command is an "issue" seems pretty far fetched to me. If you always
> want to complete files, don't run compinit in your startup files.
>
I appreciate the sophistication of that, but there are times when I 
really do want to complete on a filename even if it might seem like an 
invalid argument superficially.  I thought that compinit was the entire 
completion system!  Commenting it out and restarting, just as you say, I 
get 'dumb' file completions just as wanted.  Can we have it both ways?  
That is, tweak compinit so that perhaps on a final press of the TAB key 
it  will fall back to dumb file completion even if a kosher match has 
not been found?  Or some sort of temporary fallback to dumb completion?  
Most of the time it seems that file completion is all that's happening 
and anyway this sort of issue is very rare here, but short of restarting 
it would be nice to have dumb completion 'override' when wanted.  
Perhaps if a final press of TAB was used then instead of this:

Completing package

... we'd see:

Fallback to completing file

... or something like that.

I looked at zcompdump and there's nothing in there that looks 
promising.  I know that completion is the most inscrutable part of zsh, 
so I won't even attempt to understand it, and any tweak will be taken 
without question and on authority.  Or is there an approachable 
document?  Or some workaround?