Re: [wmii] Re: wmii feature requests

On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 02:15:01PM +0100, Anselm R. Garbe wrote:
> This has been discussed long ago several times and the answer
> is simple: no.
>
> The dmenu completion is designed to be faster/more efficient
> than bash completion because it directly matches all candidates
> without the need to press an additional <tab>. The <tab> key is
> used to copy the selected item into the input field, it's not
> used for matching. Usually <tab> is only pressed if you want to
> append further arguments to the selected list item, otherwise
> you simply press return (because that prints the selected item
> to stdout). If you want to make sure, that you only want to
> print the text you entered (assumed there are still item
> candidates (e.g. matching gv), you can enforce this with
> pressing Shift-Return.

No, I meant something different. At the beginning, using left/right
instead of tab was unusual, but in the meanwhile I think using tab for
appending arguments is a good decision.

What I wanted to suggest was adding completion for arguments. I meant,
after pressing tab someone obviously wants to add arguments. And why not
help the user also with argument completion.
So e.g. when the user wants to add arguments to xpdf, he writes:
xpdf , and here either after writing space or tab, the user shall be
prompted for *.pdf filenames in the current directory, of at least for
all filenames availble.

Of course adding completion for files in subdirectories would be quite
complex, maybe one could interoperate with the bash completion system,
but I am not sure, if that is possible.

Maybe the type of argument completion could be feed like this to dmenu:
echo -e "gvim [:filenames:]\nxpdf [:filenames:pdf,ps:]" | dmenu
defaulting to filenames if no [:completiontype:] is specified.

So, I was suggestion not changing the way completion works, but just of
adding an additional way to complete arguments of the selected item
list.

However, I see that this could be too complex to do for dmenu, but I
really think the idea itself is usefull.

--
Martin