Re: [PATCH/RFC] completion: complete all possible -no-<options>

From: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: May 8, 2018, 15:24 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8BGs7EOYFKayL-bgvEbKOJiROF52o3SneLyG9Nm6nUngA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAPig+cRkUrdtbyGEsY=DQCDoEWTrC-9n4=vKXHEap2gokB2uQg@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 7:36 AM, Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> I haven't looked at the implementation, so this may be an entirely
> stupid suggestion, but would it be possible to instead render the
> completions as?
>
>     % git checkout --<tab>
>     --[no-]conflict=                   --[no-]patch
>     --[no-]detach                      --[no-]progress
>     --[no-]ignore-other-worktrees      --[no-]quiet
>     --[no-]ignore-skip-worktree-bits   --[no-]recurse-submodules
>     --[no-]merge                       --theirs
>     --[no-]orphan=                     --[no-]track
>     --ours
>
> This would address the problem of the --no-* options taking double the
> screen space.

It took me so long to reply partly because I remember seeing some guy doing clever trick with tab completion that also shows a short help text in addition to the complete words. I could not find that again and from my reading (also internet searching) it's probably not possible to do this without trickery.

> It's also more intuitive than that lone and somewhat weird-looking
> "--no-" suggestion.

It's not that weird if you think about file path completion, where you complete one path component at a time not full path, bash just does not show you full paths to everything.

I'm arguing about this because I want to see your reaction, because I'm thinking of doing the very same thing for config completion. Right now "git config <tab>" gives you two pages of all available config variables. I'm thinking that we "git config <tab>" just shows the groups, e.g.

> ~/w/git $ git config

add. interactive. advice. log. alias. mailmap. am. man.

Only when you do "git config log.<tab>" that it shows you log.*

-- 
Duy