RE: still confused about completion and matching

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

Andrej Borsenkow wrote:

> ...
> 
> This condition predates styles. Now we do have suitable means for users to
> configure desired behaviour.

True.

> As I said long ago, I did not want Zsh to decide for me when to start menu
> completion if I did not request it. I do not want to invent another condition.
> 
> > As I sais in one of the previous mails, I wasn't completely happy with
> > that condition myself. The problem is that we certainly don't want to
> > insert the unambiguous string unconditionally even if insert-unambig
> > is set, because that string might often be empty.
> >
> 
> First, why are you _so_ sure there won't be any common prefix? For people that
> know shell glob patterns by heart it is sometimes easier to type pattern than
> to invent matching specification. And matches for foobar[1-9] are always
> shorter than pattern itself.

I'm not sure that it is, I'm sure that it might be...

> Second, how does it differ from ordinary completion? The sole thing I wanted -
> let's treat completion and matching equally. Both give you a set of matches to
> select from. Let's use common rules to decide when and how these matches are
> inserted. (After all, "ordinary" completion is just matching with pattern
> $PREFIX*$SUFFIX ... even if not implemented this way. I do not see why
> $PREFIX?#$SUFFIX should be treated differently :-)

... different from ordinary completion because there we have a lot of
code that can deal with the types of matching (match specs) allowed
there to build unambiguous strings without losing characters typed by
the user.

But I didn't want it to sound as if I'm religiously attached to the
current behaviour. I'm not. We can also change it to look up the
insert-unambiguous style lately, after the completions have been
generated. People can then use `zstyle -e' to add conditions if they
want.

I guess that would be acceptable to everyone? Especially if we add
a/some example(s) to the manual showing clever things one might want
to try there?

Bye
 Sven


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