Many thanks.

This does the trick. I'm happy with getting this in the order given without
special formatting of negative numbers.

On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 9:50 PM, Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>
wrote:

> On Dec 14,  8:35pm, Rocky Bernstein wrote:
> }
> } For example, if I enter
> }
> }     compadd --  1 2 -1 -2  -3 0
> }
> } The completions come out in the order:
> }
> }            -3   -2  -1   0    1  2
> }
> } But what I really want is the order I gave.
>
> "compadd" is actually one of the better-documented bits of the completion
> system.  Some of the "support builtins" aren't documented at all.
>
> } How can I tell compadd not to sort the completions?
>
> You need to put them in a named unsorted group.
>
>         compadd -V numbers 1 2 -1 -2  -3 0
>
> Group names end up being referenced via the "tag" slot in the six-part
> completion context string, e.g., with the compadd above you might use
>
>         zstyle ':completion:*:*:*:*:numbers' list-colors '=-*=7'
>
> to show negative numbers in reverse video.  However, to make that work
> you have to initialize the style mechanism by calling _description:
>
>         local expl
>         _description -V numbers expl 'Some Numbers'
>         compadd "$expl[@]" - 1 2 -1 -2 -3 0
>
> The _description function does all the style processing and fills in
> the $expl variable with the corresponding compadd options.  The example
> in the zsh manual isn't as clear as it could be because it uses
>
>         _description files expl file
>         compadd "$expl[@]" - "$files[@]"
>
> and although expl in the _description call maps to $expl in the compadd
> call, the two uses of "files" are unrelated.
>