zsh versus tcsh's "complete=enhance"

zsh versus tcsh's "complete=enhance"

[Jörgen Grahn]

Hi,

Before I switched from tcsh (used it for approximately fifteen years) to zsh,
I depended heavily on the complete=enhance setting. From tcsh(1):

    If the complete shell variable is set to enhance', completion 1) ignores
    case and 2) considers periods, hyphens and underscores (.', -' and _')
    to be word separators and hyphens and underscores to be equivalent.

For example, ~/News/c.o.l.an might expand to ~/News/Comp.os.linux.announce.
And it works on commands too: s_ad expands to ssh-add.

Zsh has the case-insensitive part of it, which is nice. How about the rest?
I googled around a bit, but I have only seen the question raised (as early
as in 1997), not answered.

And part two of the question: if it doesn't exist, and I want to hack it on
my copious spare time, where should I start? I have no problem implementing
the algorithm (string, fs) -> list of matches, but zsh is so large that I
wouldn't know where to place it. Or if it should be done in some command
language rather than C.

And by the way, thanks for a very nice interactive shell!

BR,
Jörgen
(not on the mailing lists, so I'd appreciate a Cc:)

-- 
  // Jörgen Grahn       "Koka lopplummer, bada Ross, loppor borta."
\X/ <grahn@snipabacken.dyndns.org>                        -- Jonas

Re: zsh versus tcsh's "complete=enhance"

[Stephane Chazelas]

On Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 06:01:05PM +0200, Jörgen Grahn wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Before I switched from tcsh (used it for approximately fifteen years) to zsh,
> I depended heavily on the complete=enhance setting. From tcsh(1):
> 
>     If the complete shell variable is set to enhance', completion 1) ignores
>     case and 2) considers periods, hyphens and underscores (.', -' and _')
>     to be word separators and hyphens and underscores to be equivalent.
> 
> For example, ~/News/c.o.l.an might expand to ~/News/Comp.os.linux.announce.
> And it works on commands too: s_ad expands to ssh-add.
[...]

Go through compinstall again, there's a menu entry exactly for
that (menu entry "2", then "p" for partial matching, you can
specify the characters).

Search for "partial-word completion" in the manual.

-- 
Stephane

Re: zsh versus tcsh's "complete=enhance"

[Thorsten Kampe]

* Jörgen Grahn (2006-04-30 17:01 +0000)
> Before I switched from tcsh (used it for approximately fifteen years) to zsh,
> I depended heavily on the complete=enhance setting. From tcsh(1):
> 
>     If the complete shell variable is set to enhance', completion 1) ignores
>     case and 2) considers periods, hyphens and underscores (.', -' and _')
>     to be word separators and hyphens and underscores to be equivalent.
> 
> For example, ~/News/c.o.l.an might expand to ~/News/Comp.os.linux.announce.
> And it works on commands too: s_ad expands to ssh-add.
> 
> Zsh has the case-insensitive part of it, which is nice. How about the rest?
> I googled around a bit, but I have only seen the question raised (as early
> as in 1997), not answered.

I have this in my .zshrc:

# case-insensitive and partial-word then substring
zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list 'm:{a-zA-Z}={A-Za-z} m:[-._]=[-._] r:|[-./_]=** r:|=*' '+l:|=*'

Thorsten

Re: zsh versus tcsh's "complete=enhance" (for Germans)

[Andy Spiegl]

Hi Thorsten,

for case-insensitive German I am using this:
 zstyle ":completion:*" matcher-list 'm:{A-Zöäüa-zÖÄÜ}={a-zÖÄÜA-Zöäü}'

Is there a shorter way to write this?

Chau,
 Andy.

-- 
 "How to make a million dollars:  First, get a million dollars."
   -- Steve Martin

Re: zsh versus tcsh's "complete=enhance" (for Germans)

[Peter Stephenson]

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Andy Spiegl wrote:
> for case-insensitive German I am using this:
>  zstyle ":completion:*" matcher-list 'm:{A-Zöäüa-zÖÄÜ}={a-zÖÄÜA-Zöäü}'
>
> Is there a shorter way to write this?

It looks like equivalence classes (the braces in that pattern) for
completion matchers are fairly simply handled at present.  The code for
this part of the matching appears (for once) not to be too tortuous and
it ought to be possible to extend it.

You probably want to be able to do something like
'm:{[:upper:]}={[:lower:]}' in a manner similar to ranges in normal
pattern matching.  This ought to be doable by having isupper() tests and
tolower() conversions.  However, I haven't looked at the details.

The matcher code uses multibyte strings rather than wide characters, so
it looks like yet another conversion would be needed.  Probably the
matcher code is better done entirely with wide characters, but that
requires understanding it first...

Any further details should probably go to zsh-workers.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070