Re: Two missing completion functions that bug me

["Oliver Kiddle" <okiddle@yahoo.co.uk>]

--- Bart Schaefer <schaefer@candle.brasslantern.com> wrote:

> You're right; upon another attempt, none of -c, -e, nor -h need the
> `+'.

The plus says that the argument to the option can appear in the same or
subsequent word. I used it for only -p and -r. The -s passed to
_arguments allowed options to be in one word.

> but in fact that's because -a takes an argument, not (only) because

Actually, the way I had written this was to not specify that -a or -A
took an argument because they don't really. The manual shows:
  vared [-Aache] [-p prompt] [-r rprompt] name
I interpret this as meaning that -A and -a do not take an argument.
What they do is modify the type of the final argument (name).

For -a/-A, my function had just:
  '(-a)-A[create an associative array]' \
  '(-A)-a[create an array]' \
and I finished it with:
  '1:parameter:_vars'  # Note also, I used a 1 which you didn't
                       # - can only vared one parameter

so with -A or -a, mine wasn't going to limit completion to arrays. It
didn't really occur to be to use _parameters -g for them.

The solution would be to use a state for the last (parameter) argument
and make it check $opt_args and select either _vars or _parameters
depending on this. I'm not sure whether it is worth it to do this
because -A and -a are only of any use if combined with -c so when
creating a new array which won't exist to be completed anyway.

> } Would it be worth it to try to have completions for all builtins
> ready
> } for 4.0?
> Possibly.

I looked at a few yesterday and didn't get very far because it doesn't
make sense for many. I've got a few queries and thoughts:

I got confused as to why the r variant of fc allows -l. I thought it
would just use _command_names (and history numbers which we don't have
a function for). I only use zle based and csh style history so don't
know much about the ksh stuff. What should it take?

Are getln and pushln of any use interactively? I got confused trying to
alter _read and _print for them.

_ttyctl was a 5 second job so is done. (commit after Sven's great move)

pwd and echo would be fairly doable if we ignore the possibility of
someone disabling them or using /bin/pwd. Do any non-builtin pwd's take
any arguments? Any ideas on the types of echo? We really need the
generalised _is_gnu for this.

: by definition should use default completion so I'll leave it.

Is it worth doing one for test / [. It is tempting to define one to:
    _message 'use conditional expressions (with [[ ... ]]) instead'

> I get the same list as you, by comparing ${(k)_comps} to
> ${(k)builtins}.
Exactly what I did. I've got a static zsh without many modules here
though and there will be a few builtins which use something standard
like _parameters.

>   compadd        compdescribe   compgroups     compset        comptry
>   comparguments  compfiles      compquote      comptags      
> compvalues

True. There is your your point about interactive function writing
though. I also sometimes use zsh completion as a quicker alternatve to
man pages. Would anyone find any of these useful? I'm quite tempted to
write one for compadd.
 
> Similarly zregexparse, which although it could be used interactively,

Yes, I've never used that. I'm not even sure how many people other than
Akira and Sven have even looked at _regex_arguments. I only fairly
recently had a serious look at it and there were still quite a few
typos in the documentation (which I fixed) which just goes to show how
few people have looked at it.

> These don't need completions because they're keywords:
>   break     continue

so is nocorrect which does have a completion. Arguably, the completion
system should handle it elsewhere like it does with, for example while.

> Which leaves:
> 
>   :            echo         pushln       suspend      umask
>   [            exit         pwd          test         zformat
>   bye          getln        r            ttyctl       zparseopts
>   dirs         logout       return       ulimit       zprof

bye, exit and return could maybe share a functon which just calls
message with something like 'return code'.

ulimit could/should have a completion written. I've always used limit
being a tcsh convert but I'll look into this.

umask is fairly easy (but not very useful) so I'll do it. This reminds
me: ages ago I thought of doing an intelligent completion for chmod so
for example, chmod g+x would only complete files lacking group execute
permission.

> } Any ideas what should be done for commands with just one option
> } (like suspend) - completing -f might not be what people expect.
> 
> Behave as if prefix-needed is true.  Complete nothing unless the `-'
> is
> already there.

I was also wondering if it should maybe list the single -f option with
a description rather than completing it so you can see what it does.

Oliver

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