Re: Completion in pwd before subdirecories

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

Bart wrote:
> On Dec 15, 12:49pm, Oliver Kiddle wrote:
> }
> }   zstyle ':completion:*' file-patterns \
> }       '*(-/):directories %p(^-/):globbed-files' '*:all-files'
> } 
> } Unfortunately, that will now break for any completion which specifies a
> } glob qualifier such as _chown.
> 
> Are you sure about that?

No. Sorry, didn't test it so based on what you say below, I'm probably
wrong.

> There's code in _files to attempt to merge together any trailing stuff
> that looks like glob qualifiers, because _files predates the #q flag.
> In fact, I'm suspicious that adding #q might actually break things.

I'll have to test. I seem to remember it not working once in the past.

> } I'm not quite sure whether the default file-patterns style shouldn't
> } use %p(^-/) for globbed-files anyway.
> 
> I don't think I understand the question.

For that you need to look back at the original question on -users and
look at why the file-patterns style above was needed. Patterns like *
match directories so the directories were completed twice. This meant
the directory got completed in the globbed-files group before the
directories group was reached. Working out that the file-patterns style
is needed and why is not obvious. So I wondered whether the default
file-patterns style shouldn't be this.

> Are you suggesting that we should split the existing globbed-files default
> into globbed-files and globbed-directories?  I.e., so that instead of the

I wasn't suggesting that but it is an idea that may be worth thinking
about.

> } What if we want to glob directory names from a completion function?
> 
> I'm not making the connection between that question and the previous one.
> 
> However, nothing stops any completion function from doing something like
> 
>     zstyle -m ":completion:${curcontext}:" file-patterns '*' ||
> 	zstyle ":completion:${curcontext}:" file-patterns \
> 	    '%p(-/):directories %p(^-/):globbed-files' '*:all-files'
> 

Doing that from every completion function which just wants to glob for
a certain file extension is not pleasant.

It has never seemed ideal to me that, for example, gunzip completion
will complete a directory called dir.gz even if the user has
directories after files in their file-patterns style. Ideally we should
tidy things up from the completion functions and not expect user's to
set the file-patterns style for every command.

For the majority of commands we use something like _files -g '*.gz' to
specify a filename extension. These should ideally not match
directories. For some commands like chown, we use a more complex glob
where it is valid to match directories (though some user's may still
want directory completion deferred).

One option might be for _files to add the (^-/) when substituting
%p and to add a -/g option to suppress this when the glob should also
match directories. We could even have other escapes in addition to %p
which give the user more control. A user who relies on _next_tags to
get at directories may want explicitly globbed directories first for
commands like chown.

Oliver