Re: Picky criticism of ls completion list formatting

[Peter Whaite <peta@cortexmachina.com>]

Peter Stephenson said:
> "Bart Schaefer" wrote:
> > On Jun 28, 12:21pm, Peter Whaite wrote:
> > } Subject: Picky criticism of ls completion list formatting
> > }
> > } Listing completions for 'ls' uses more lines because it formats using
> > } one less column.
> > 
> > Try `setopt list_packed'.  If that doesn't make a difference, then there
> > may be something wrong with the "packing" code that we need to look at.
> 
> list_packed still uses three spaces between columns, it just varies the
> column widths.  It might be time to make the column spacing configurable.
> Presumably that's not too hard.

Yes list_packed made a satisfactory difference.

OK I see.  The (GNU) ls algorithm uses variable column widths separated with 2
spaces, whereas zsh by default uses the same column width for all the columns
separated by 3 spaces.  List_packed makes the widths variable but still keeps
the spacing of 3.

Configurable spacing sounds good sometime.  I assume 3 was for readability,
but 2 or 1 is better to conserve space.  TeXish stretch and shrink?

---
peta