[QUERY] How do you sort completions?

Hi,

I'm not able to sort completions for some weird reason. No matter what I order I insert stuff into COMPREPLY, bash seems to auto-sort them lexically. I tried to pass --sort='-committerdate' to git for-each-ref so I can get a sensible 'git checkout <TAB>' reply, and I'm very annoyed that it doesn't work.

I thought it was bash's complete builtin doing the implicit sorting, so I read the manual with no success. Is readline doing it? If so, why am I not getting the ordering even in zsh (which doesn't use readline)?

What am I missing?

Ram

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 6:33 AM, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> wrote:

AFAIK bash needs the completions sorted, so we added some | sort | uniq. I suppose zsh doesn't need that, but have you tried by calling compadd directly?

Hi,

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 08:11:00AM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:

Actually, it seems to sort and remove duplicates automatically:

$ _foo () { COMPREPLY=("bar" "foo" "bar" "baz") ; } $ complete -F _foo foo $ foo <TAB> bar baz foo

So that | sort | uniq might not be necessary after all, and by removing them we could spare two fork()+exec()s.

I'm not sure all supported Bash versions behave this way, though.

Best, Gábor

Hi,

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 05:03:27PM +0530, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

The order of elements in COMPREPLY doesn't matter, it will be sorted anyway:

$ _foo () { COMPREPLY=("foo" "bar" "baz") ; } $ complete -F _foo foo $ foo <TAB> bar baz foo

I don't know who does the sorting (Bash or readline), and I don't know any way to disable it.

Gábor

SZEDER Gábor wrote:

Damn; so it's impossible to have a custom-sorted completion list in bash. Any idea about zsh? I know that there are completion groups, but I'd really like custom sorting.

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 6:18 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> wrote:

I think sorting is required for faster look-up, most likely with dichotomic search. Otherwise it would have to search the whole list each time.

Antoine Pelisse wrote:

Oh, it's probably keeping just one copy of the completions in memory (which has to be sorted for search); this is also used to display. Makes sense, although I would have expected the shell to keep two copies: a sorted one for searching through, and another preserving the original order for displaying. I suppose they didn't think of it.

You could do that with tcsh :)