Re: completion: lookup argument using descriptions

[Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com>]

On 6/10/21, Roman Perepelitsa <roman.perepelitsa@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 11:31 AM Tomasz Pala <gotar@polanet.pl> wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> sometimes I find myself looking for appropriate option by reading down
>> all the descriptions of the arguments before going straight to the
>> documentation to simply /search for some phrase. I wonder: would that be
>> possible directly from zle?
>
> Try this:
>
>     zmodload zsh/complist
>     setopt menucomplete
>     zstyle ':completion:*' menu select=0 search
>
> This will allow you to search right away after TAB.
>
> Roman.

If you only want to do this sometimes (since defaulting to search mode
for all completion is probably extremely annoying), you can bind it to
a separate key;

zle -C menu-select-search menu-complete _generic
zstyle ':completion:menu-select-search:*' menu select search
zstyle ':completion:menu-select-search:*' completer _oldlist _expand _complete
bindkey "^[M"  menu-select-search # alt-shift-m

or if you already have a key bound to start regular menu selection, eg
bindkey "^[m"  menu-select
(this requires no other setup, it's a stock widget)
then you can press ^R to enter the search mode from there, if you also do
bindkey -M menuselect '^R' history-incremental-search-forward
(this is handled specially in menu select mode, and won't actually
invoke history searching.)

-- 
Mikael Magnusson