Re: ZSpeak! Only Zsh can do this!

[Mario Lang <mlang@home.delysid.org>]

Sven Wischnowsky <wischnow@informatik.hu-berlin.de> writes:

> Mario Lang wrote:
> 
> > # * Modify the completion system so that menu-completion inserted
> > #   text gets spoken.
> 
> This could get me immensely interested.  While developing the new
> completion system we were discussing ways to get at the strings for
> the matches from shell code.  Support for this kind of stuff is
> certainly a good reason to add that (after the 4.0 release, though).
OK. this clarifies the question. It would be nice to have this.
Perhaps for other things to (such as explain-on, which could display/speak
hints while typing).

I suspect that I have to wait with my other features till this
is a bit clarified because completion gets written to stdout,
and when I want to capture stdout, Ill come into a lot of garbage problems I think?

Another really nice to have(tm) feature would be stdout buffering.
What I mean is that the shell should have an array (much like history)
which contains the outputs (stdout and stderr separated)
from the last commands.
This would create alot of possibilities, including the one
of extracting parts of the output in a command.
something like
% ps aux
...
% kill `grep myprog <(print $stdout[1])|awk '{print $2;}'`
would be possible. I know this is an extreme example. But I am
convinced that this feature would find its uses.
Obviously speech support would benefit ALOT.

> 
> And I think the completion system can offer other things that might be 
> helpful.  Having it tell you the descriptions it can generate for
> example (describing the types of matches generated in a certain
> context), having it read the completions and descriptions in menu
> selection (`option -o is for ...') and so on.
You got it. Thats what I want to do.

> I've long wanted to learn more about how handicapped people work with
> computers.  Are there any interesting places on the net I could look
> at for more information?

Hmm, you have to be a bit more specific. The topic is very large.
at least http://www.leb.net/blinux is the center of blind Linux users.


-- 
CYa,
   Mario <mlang@delysid.org>
Homepage(s): http://delysid.org | http://piss.at/

UNIX was half a billion (500000000) seconds old on
Tue Nov  5 00:53:20 1985 GMT (measuring since the time(2) epoch).
		-- Andy Tannenbaum