[xmonad] XPrompt.Shell feature requests

[Andrea Rossato]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 05:22:15AM -0600, Spencer Janssen wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 03:54:51PM -1000, lithis wrote:
> > There are a couple things that annoy me about XPrompt.Shell:
> > 
> > 1. When tab-completing a directory name, a trailing slash is
> > not automatically appended. Thus an additional keystroke is
> > required, unlike any other tab completion system I’m familiar
> > with (mostly those in bash and Vim).
> 
> Seems like a nice idea, dunno the best way to tackle it.

As far as I recall it is bash (which is used for file and directory
completion) not to put a trailing slash. I'll investigate if I can
come up with a solution - the prompt doesn't check if the string is a
file name, a command, or whatever.

> 
> > 2. Filenames in the pop-up tab-completion list are escaped.
> > This makes the names harder to read. Could the unescaped
> > filenames appear in the list and then be escaped after tab
> > is pressed as the string is copied into the prompt line?
> 
> I'd vote against this.  Consider a situation where files "foo", "bar" and
> "foo bar" exist.  Then there are two commands that appear as "touch foo bar" on
> screen, but will execute different things depending on whether the user used
> tab completion.  Furthermore, I think it is pretty standard to display the
> escapes in this fashion (it is what bash and zsh do, at least).

I don't think this could be easily done, even though I would like the
possibility to show completions without escape characters sometimes (I
wanted something like that for the theme prompt).

The problem is that the prompt will try to complete the final word
(which means, the word after the last space). This is not related to
the completion list, obviously, but the command line will just display
the text of the selected completion, without any change. And so, if
you want "foo bar" to be treated a single word there's the need of a
'\' before the space.

Cheers,
Andrea