How to capture the tab completion result?

How to capture the tab completion result?

[Mario Signorino]

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Hi all

I need some help and possibly also an advice.

I want is to surround the result of the tab-completion with a special
not-printable chars.

I'm working on an application with embedded a special terminal emulator
inherited from gnome-terminal. I want to modify the common TAB behaviour
and manipulate the result of all TAB-completions: any string generated
pressing TAB should be handled by my app before going on screen.
So: the "special not printable chars" would be the way to tell my terminal:
"hey... there are some tab completions for you".

In my program I will do some work on the completion result and then I will
display it to the user in the terminal window (in some cases). I need to do
the job in my c++ code and there is no way to do that at shell level.

The best would be to switch on and off this features with an environment
var in order not to mess up the system in case I login with a standard
terminal. The dream would also have some difference between "file
completion" and everything else (as command option). For example:
completing an "ls /etc/ap" gives me a lot of result: I should know in my
terminal app that the results are files and which is their full path. In
this case, parsing the "ls /etc/ap" wuold be easy... but sometimes in the
command line there are many more chars...

The "surround char" is what I think is the easiest way... maybe also
putting everything in an env variable could be another valid way.
Everything should works also through an ssh connection... this means: I
cannot use any trick as piping result in a socket or anything else that
uses local resource.

I just spent three day into bash sources without any acceptable result. So,
looking for an alternative, I came on zsh.
So: can I do what I need with zsh?
One "yes!" and a general suggestion will be enough.

Tnx
Mario

Re: How to capture the tab completion result?

[Bart Schaefer]

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On Saturday, May 25, 2013, Mario Signorino wrote:

> Hi all
>
> I need some help and possibly also an advice.
>
> I want is to surround the result of the tab-completion with a special
> not-printable chars.


This is not going to be straightforward, but have a look at Test/comptest
in the sources, which does a similar thing.  It forces completion listings
and then "colors" them with markup that can be parsed.  The characters it
uses aren't actually non-printing, but if your app is going to grab the
listing on its way to the terminal anyway, perhaps it can also strip the
markup.

Re: How to capture the tab completion result?

[Mario Signorino]

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 1:10 AM, Bart Schaefer
<schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:
> > I want is to surround the result of the tab-completion with a special
> > not-printable chars.
> This is not going to be straightforward, but have a look at Test/comptest
> in the sources, which does a similar thing.  It forces completion listings

Hi!
That's exactly what I needed.
Now...

zstyle ":completion:*:descriptions" format "\033[H<DESCRIPTION>%d</DESCRIPTION>"

Is it also possible to enable the interpretation of backslash escapes?
For example I added a "\033[H" in the above line.
I tried, but... no luck.

Tnx
Mario

Re: How to capture the tab completion result?

[Bart Schaefer]

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 9:45 AM, Mario Signorino
<mario.signorino@gnufish.net> wrote:
>
> zstyle ":completion:*:descriptions" format "\033[H<DESCRIPTION>%d</DESCRIPTION>"
>
> Is it also possible to enable the interpretation of backslash escapes?

Just use the $'...' notation to embed a literal escape in the style:

zstyle ":completion:*:descriptions" format
$'\033[H<DESCRIPTION>%d</DESCRIPTION>'

It's sort of a matter of personal preference whether to write
$'\033'"[H..." (concatenate two sets of quotes) or just wrap the whole
thing in $'...' like I did.  Concatenating the double quotes makes it
easier to reference variables, etc., but you can't use $'...' inside
double quotes.

Re: How to capture the tab completion result?

[Mario Signorino]

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Again: that's exactly what I needed.
Tnx a lot.
Mario


On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Bart Schaefer
<schaefer@brasslantern.com>wrote:

> On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 9:45 AM, Mario Signorino
> <mario.signorino@gnufish.net> wrote:
> >
> > zstyle ":completion:*:descriptions" format
> "\033[H<DESCRIPTION>%d</DESCRIPTION>"
> >
> > Is it also possible to enable the interpretation of backslash escapes?
>
> Just use the $'...' notation to embed a literal escape in the style:
>
> zstyle ":completion:*:descriptions" format
> $'\033[H<DESCRIPTION>%d</DESCRIPTION>'
>
> It's sort of a matter of personal preference whether to write
> $'\033'"[H..." (concatenate two sets of quotes) or just wrap the whole
> thing in $'...' like I did.  Concatenating the double quotes makes it
> easier to reference variables, etc., but you can't use $'...' inside
> double quotes.
>

Re: How to capture the tab completion result?

[Marc Chantreux]

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 01:27:51AM +0200, Mario Signorino wrote:
> I want is to surround the result of the tab-completion with a special
> not-printable chars. 

it also would be nice to use zsh as a completion engine for the vim
omni-completion. 

regards

-- 
Marc Chantreux (eiro on github and freenode)
http://eiro.github.com/
http://eiro.github.com/atom.xml
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet"
    -- Abraham Lincoln