Trial patch for showing completion in progress

Trial patch for showing completion in progress

[Peter Stephenson]

I often want to find out what completion is doing when it goes away for
a while.  Here's a simple patch that helps, though I think there's more
that can be done.  No documentation yet.

As defined, you set the show-completer style to true in any context
where you want to show the status.  It is examined when each element of
the completer list is tried.  The message is overwritten by any list
output.

Is there a better place for this?  On the whole I think this point is OK.

Is there a way of doing this only if completion takes a certain time?
E.g. store SECONDS as floating point and examine it at certain key
points?

Is there a way of removing the zle -M output if the completion produced
no output?

Index: Completion/Base/Core/_main_complete
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/zsh/zsh/Completion/Base/Core/_main_complete,v
retrieving revision 1.9
diff -u -r1.9 _main_complete
--- Completion/Base/Core/_main_complete	2 Mar 2004 12:52:06 -0000	1.9
+++ Completion/Base/Core/_main_complete	9 Sep 2004 11:10:50 -0000
@@ -135,7 +135,10 @@
   else
     _completer="${tmp[2,-1]//_/-}"
   fi
+
   curcontext="${curcontext/:[^:]#:/:${_completer}:}"
+  zstyle -t ":completion:${curcontext}:" show-completer &&
+    zle -M "Trying completion for :completion:${curcontext}"
 
   zstyle -a ":completion:${curcontext}:" matcher-list _matchers ||
       _matchers=( '' )

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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Re: Trial patch for showing completion in progress

[Oliver Kiddle]

Peter wrote:
> I often want to find out what completion is doing when it goes away for
> a while.  Here's a simple patch that helps, though I think there's more
> that can be done.  No documentation yet.

In most cases, if it takes a while it is filename completion trying to
look for files in the full path: the stuff which allows /u/l/b to
complete to /usr/local/bin.

> As defined, you set the show-completer style to true in any context
> where you want to show the status.  It is examined when each element of
> the completer list is tried.  The message is overwritten by any list
> output.
> 
> Is there a better place for this?  On the whole I think this point is OK.

It depends what you are trying to do. Are you trying to show the
completers or the zstyle context? _main_complete is not the only place
the context is changed so for showing the context, _description or
_setup would be a better place.

> Is there a way of doing this only if completion takes a certain time?
> E.g. store SECONDS as floating point and examine it at certain key
> points?

Why not just stick $SECONDS (as floating point) in PS4 and use
_complete_debug.

I'm not convinced we should be sticking debug stuff like this into
completion unless it really is proven to be useful. I normally prefer to
use a second tty for completion debug output instead of zle. And it
isn't hard to make temporary changes to _main_complete (or whatever) for
debugging.

> Is there a way of removing the zle -M output if the completion produced
> no output?

Either you have to replace compadd with a function or, depending on
where you produce the debug, you might be able to check
compstate[nmatches].

Oliver

Re: Trial patch for showing completion in progress

[Peter Stephenson]

Oliver Kiddle wrote:
> > Is there a better place for this?  On the whole I think this point is OK.
> 
> It depends what you are trying to do. Are you trying to show the
> completers or the zstyle context? _main_complete is not the only place
> the context is changed so for showing the context, _description or
> _setup would be a better place.

No, it's just a gross indication of what process is happening.

> Why not just stick $SECONDS (as floating point) in PS4 and use
> _complete_debug.

That's a completely different thing requiring hours of sifting
information.  With this you can find out what you want to know as you're
actually using it.

> I'm not convinced we should be sticking debug stuff like this into
> completion unless it really is proven to be useful.

I don't want to debug it, I want to see what it's doing without lots of
extra work.  Progress information is a perfectly normal thing to have in
a system.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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Re: Trial patch for showing completion in progress

[Bart Schaefer]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Peter Stephenson wrote:

> Is there a better place for this?  On the whole I think this point is OK.

How about this?

    zstyle () {
        [[ $3 = matcher-list ]] && {
            zle -R "Trying completion for $2"
            sleep 1
        }
        builtin zstyle "$@"
    }

> Is there a way of doing this only if completion takes a certain time?

I don't think there's a sifficiently low-level loop that's common to all
completions.  You could try hooking into _wanted or _tags, I suppose.

> Is there a way of removing the zle -M output if the completion produced
> no output?

Using zle -R instead of -M takes care of that.  Is there some other bad
side-effect of -R?

Re: Trial patch for showing completion in progress

[Peter Stephenson]

Bart Schaefer wrote:
> How about this?
> 
>     zstyle () {
>         [[ $3 = matcher-list ]] && {
>             zle -R "Trying completion for $2"
>             sleep 1
>         }
>         builtin zstyle "$@"
>     }

Nasty but interesting.  The `sleep 1' misses the point, however, which
is that you see what it's doing in real time.  If it's fast enough that
the message doesn't appear, you don't care.

> > Is there a way of removing the zle -M output if the completion produced
> > no output?
> 
> Using zle -R instead of -M takes care of that.  Is there some other bad
> side-effect of -R?

That would be fine.  I was thinking it shouldn't be connected with a
redisplay, but of course it has to be in any case.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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