Re: (file) completion in compinstall

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

Peter Stephenson wrote:

> > As I understand, compinstall is using vared to get input. Currently,
> > completion in the first prompt (for the file name) tries to complete
> > commands; I did not try any other (is there anything accept file names
> > that may be sensibly completed? I believe, everything else is menu
> > driven or free text input)
> 
> I was going to remark on this, too, but forgot.  As far as I know,
> completion usually just treats a line of vared input exactly the same way
> as an ordinary command line.  This is very rarely the most useful
> behaviour; a better default would be ordinary default completion,
> i.e. assume a null command and treat the rest as command words.
> 
> There's some low-level support: compstate[vared] gets set to the name of
> the parameter being edited and can be detected in completion functions.
> However, there doesn't seem to be any support in the function system with
> the exception of some commented-out code in _first, which would treat the
> line being edited as if you were editing an assignment to that variable.  I
> can't remember why that's not the default.

Now that you say that... neither can I.

> It might be possible to change this in compinstall by setting
> compstate[context] directly, but come to think of it, I doubt if it
> actually is possible outside a completion widget.  Even then, making the
> value local would be unpleasant.

You can't, $compstate is not available there.

> I'd prefer a more general solution to completion with vared, if Sven has
> any ideas...

That's what $compcontext is for. Similar to what Functions/Misc/nslookup
does, you just do:

  local compcontext=compinstall

And then have a completion function with `#compdef compinstall'. There 
you either unconditionally complete for inside of compinstall or, like 
_nslookup, you first test `[[ -n "$compcontext" ]]' to see if you are
completing inside compinstall or its arguments.

Using the indirection ($compcontext gives a context which is looked up 
in $_comps) allows users to override the default implementation with
their own functions, as usual.

Is that enough and clean enough?

Bye
 Sven


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