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
