Re: tab completion sort by modification time

[Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 9:11 PM, Peter Stephenson
<p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> 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.

As it happens, I have one of these lying around already (I'm 83% sure
you wrote this for me too),
zstyle ':completion:most-recent-file:*' match-original both
zstyle ':completion:most-recent-file:*' file-sort modification
zstyle ':completion:most-recent-file:*' file-patterns '*:all\ files'
zstyle ':completion:most-recent-file:*' hidden all
zstyle ':completion:most-recent-file:*' completer _files
zle -C most-recent-file menu-complete _generic
bindkey "^N"      most-recent-file

-- 
Mikael Magnusson