Ordering of alternatives for menu completion

Ordering of alternatives for menu completion

[Jesper Nygårds]

I use menu completion and I am trying to make a simple completion
function NOT sort the completion alternatives alphabetically.

I have a function called up(), and I am trying to add a completion
function for it, as follows:

_up() {
  local myarray myindex revarray
  myarray=( ${(s:/:)PWD} )
  revarray=()
  for myindex in {2..$(( $#myarray - 1 ))}; do
      revarray=( $myarray[$myindex] $revarray[@] )
  done
  compadd - $revarray
}

compdef _up up

What it does is that it splits the current path into its parts, and
then reverses the array, ignoring the current directory (the last part
of the original array). So if $PWD is
"/Workbench/workspace/actual/src/main/resources", $revarray will be
"main src actual workspace Workbench".

This works fine, but when I use the completion like this: "up <tab>",
the alternatives are cycled in alphabetical order. I want them to be
suggested in the order of $revarray, i.e. with the closest parent
first and the progressively higher up in the hierarchy, but some
mechanism sorts the alternatives alphabetically.

I have experimented with different ways to indicate that I don't want
this array to be sorted, but haven't succeeded. How can I achieve
this?

Re: Ordering of alternatives for menu completion

[Peter Stephenson]

On Wed, 7 Mar 2012 14:24:43 +0100
Jesper Nygårds <jesper.nygards@gmail.com> wrote:
> _up() {
>   local myarray myindex revarray
>   myarray=( ${(s:/:)PWD} )
>   revarray=()
>   for myindex in {2..$(( $#myarray - 1 ))}; do
>       revarray=( $myarray[$myindex] $revarray[@] )
>   done
>   compadd - $revarray
> }
> This works fine, but when I use the completion like this: "up <tab>",
> the alternatives are cycled in alphabetical order. I want them to be
> suggested in the order of $revarray, i.e. with the closest parent
> first and the progressively higher up in the hierarchy, but some
> mechanism sorts the alternatives alphabetically.

You need to tell compadd by passing -V plus the name of a group of
matches.  I think

  compadd -V unsorted - $revarray

ought to be good enough.  While I'm at it,

  compadd -V unsorted -a revarray

is a little more efficient if the array is big.

(It's not too hard to make this use the usual tags mechanism to mix with
other completions but it doesn't sound like you actually need that.)

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>            Software Engineer
Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070                   Cambridge Silicon Radio Limited
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Re: Ordering of alternatives for menu completion

[Jesper Nygårds]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Peter Stephenson
<Peter.Stephenson@csr.com> wrote:
>  compadd -V unsorted - $revarray
>
> ought to be good enough.  While I'm at it,
>
>  compadd -V unsorted -a revarray
>
> is a little more efficient if the array is big.
>

Thank you, Peter, this solves my problem.

Jesper