Re: Es and autocompleting

[Noah Friedman <friedman@splode.com>]

>in a windowing system, the window environment multiplexes the keystrokes
>and has to handle the edit stream, so why not let it do the completion
>magic too?  It can also provide history, do so across different windows
>for a single history file, and maybe even provide other command
>mechanisms, too. As a minor example, I once had a hacked version of 9term
>that would receive commands from a pipe and forward them to the shell.

Completion is context-sensitive and requires knowledge of grammar and
syntax, which vary from shell to shell.

If you have to teach the window system how to do context-sensitive
completion and history for csh, sh, rc, scsh, etc. you've now moved a lot
of application-specific knowledge into the window system where it will
never be kept up to date because a different vendor is responsible for
maintaining it.

I don't understand what advantage is obtained in terms of UI, architecture,
or overall code bloat.