Re: Es and autocompleting

[Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no>]

+ DaVinci <bombadil@wanadoo.es>:

|  I thought this list was died. It's a good surprise to read you ;)

Yeah, we who have been on the list for the past seven years or more
are kind of surprised too.

|  But I find a little incomodity in interactive use. It has
|  autocompleting for files, but not for commands. I have encountered
|  this feature in other shells and it seems to me very pleasant for
|  large command names.

Um, do you frequently have to type command names so long that this is
an issue?  When I observe people using this feature, it seems to me
that they use it more to remind themselves of the name of a command
they have half forgotten.

|  Would it be posible to implement it in es without much work? Is
|  there any problem for you not wanting it in es?

Well, there is always the creeping featuritis argument: Features creep
in one by one, eventually swelling the shell to a gigantic and
unmanagable size.  This resistance to feeping creatures can be said to
be inherited from rc, and is something that I heartily endorse, though
I have been known to ask for the occasional feature myself.

Perhaps more to the point, however, is that in es, path searching is
not done internally in C code, but rather in es code (%pathsearch).
This will certainly make it trickier to implement a command search,
particularly as you can write your own %pathsearch that is free to
invent a command of its own in response to a query.

|  Have you any ideas to work quickly without autocomplete commands?.

I rarely miss it.  And when I do, it's because I forgot the name of a
command, in which case man -k is usually a better tool.  If I find
myself frequently using a command with a long name, I create a brief
acronym for it.  For example,

  fn gv {ghostview $*}

or even 

  fn-gv=ghostview

(Of course this is a bad example, since gv is an actual program that
is better than ghostview anyway.  But you get my drift.)

- Harald