Re: [wmii] Re: wmii feature requests

On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 02:45:26PM +0100, Martin Stubenschrott wrote:
> 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.

No I understand what you mean.

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

I think the right place to achieve what you want is the shell,
which supports this task already. dmenu is designed to run
simple commands only.

Regards,

-- 
 Anselm R. Garbe >< http://suckless.org/~arg/ >< GPG key: 0D73F361