Re: Rough Draft of Article on Writing Completion Functions

[John Beppu <beppu@ax9.org>]

[  date  ] 2002/04/05 | Friday | 11:15 AM
[ author ] Oliver Kiddle <okiddle@yahoo.co.uk> 

> >     If anything strikes you as being wrong, let me know.
> I couldn't see anything wrong besides what Sven has already picked up
> on. If you didn't get Sven's reply, it is because he seems to have sent
> it to zsh-workers only so check the mailing list archives.

Actually, I meant to send it to zsh-workers only, but I accidentally
sent it to zsh-users.  In mutt, I hit reply when the cursor was on that
message by that John guy who wanted a zsh equivalent of the bash
completion project.  Little did he know... haha.  But anyway, I got rid
of the In-Reply-To: header, but failed to notice the To: header said
zsh-users in it.

However, it seems as if I've helped at least one person on zsh-users who
had some nice things to say in a private email, so it was a fortunate
accident.

 
> Is there going to be any surrounding context or whatever from which
> it will be at least clear what zsh is?

I'm kinda hoping people can give it a glance, and figure out what zsh is
by using their intuition.
 

> > SUBHEAD: The Pros and Cons of the Various Sources of Information
> 
> You could also mention the mailing lists as a source of information in
> this section. Though they probably aren't so much a starting point as a
> place to go later.

I had the same feeling, but I didn't know where to put it, and by the
time I got to the end of writing, I forgot about it.  I think I'll
mention it somewhere in the concluding parts.

 
> > You don't need to know a lot more than this to effectively write
> > completion functions, so without further adieu, let's look at an
> 
> I thought that phrase was normally `further ado', or am I wrong.

I looked into that, and it turns out you're right.  There is a French
adieu that means goodbye, and it's totally unrelated to the English ado
which has the meaning that I actually wanted.  Good catch.

 
> > [ BEGIN SIDEBAR 4 - Refinements ]
> > 
> > [ JSB: this entire sidebar is optional ]
> > 
> > Oliver Kiddle from the zsh-workers mailing list suggested the following
> > improvements to I<_figlet>.
> 
> If this sidebar doesn't make it in you could mention briefly that the
> _figlet that will be distributed with the next version of zsh includes
> a few improvements.

OK.

I think how I'll do it is by putting a comment in the code listing
with a message that states that there's a new and improved one coming
up.  The only reason I didn't use your suggestions in the main listing
was that I wanted to show people how states worked.


    Peace,
    beppu


PS: I have some urgent business to take care of, and I might not have
    the time to address some of the comments I saw on zsh-workers until
    tomorrow or even Sunday.  I've read them, and I have replies to them
    stewing in my mind, but I don't have time to write them down.
    Please be patient with me.