Re: Having different completion widgets

[Sven Wischnowsky <wischnow@informatik.hu-berlin.de>]

Felix Rosencrantz wrote:

> ...
>
> I tried writing a simple completion widget, _alt_complete, which can
> change the function field to the name of the current widget.  Using zle -C,
> and zstyle it would be possible to get a lot of different completion behaviors:
> 
> zle -C widget1 .complete-word _alt_complete
> zle -C widget2 .complete-word _alt_complete
> zle -C widget3 .complete-word _alt_complete
> zstyle ':completion:widget1:*' completer _oldlist _complete '_correct'
> '_approximate' _complete _prefix _history
> zstyle ':completion:widget2:*' completer _oldlist _menu _complete  _correct
> '_approximate'
> zstyle ':completion:widget3:*' completer _oldlist _complete '_prefix'
> 
> _alt_complete () {
>         local curcontext="$curcontext" 
> 
>         [[ -z "$curcontext" ]] && curcontext=:::
>         curcontext="$WIDGET:${curcontext#*:}"
> 
>         _main_complete "$@"
> }
> 
> This works fine.  Though, I was thinking that it would be possible to provide 
> even more flexibility by putting a call into _main_complete with _funcall
> to a hook function that could decide on how to change curcontext based on
> whatever criteria the user wants.  We could provide some simple example
> hook functions that would set the function field based on things like 
> the current widget, the value of a shell variable,  hostname, OS, etc.
>
> ...
> 
> It seems that this would provide an easy way to provide some useful
> alternatives to the command widgets (e.g. _correct_word, most_recent_file)
> using the main completion widget.
> 
> Does this seem useful?  Is it useful enough to include in the distribution?
> Is there a better or more appropriate way to offer this functionality? 

I don't have any strong feelings about this (which means I'm not
against it ;-). But I always like extensibility and I hadn't thought
about customizing key bindings more than we can do now...

Hm, I think I would either put everything into _main_complete,
something like (untested):

  [[ $#funcstack -eq 1 && $WIDGET != _main_complete ]] &&
      { _funcall ... || curcontext=... }

Or put everything, including the _funcall in the _alt_complete
bindable command. Dunno.

Bye
 Sven


--
Sven Wischnowsky                         wischnow@informatik.hu-berlin.de