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Spiffiness is in the eye of the beholder
Authored by: el bid on May 14, '02 08:00:40AM
I think there is some confusion. To get to "VuescanX umirrored", you can just type "cd Vu [tab][tab]" instead of "cd Vu [tab][space][tab]"


Yes, there was some confusion here on my part -- of course I should have escaped the space in my example above, which introduces one extra keystroke, and strengthens the case for the bindkey reassignment of Tab.

But I'm still agin it. Tab by default has an incredibly useful behaviour which will get over-written.

It may often happen that you've constructed a long command line to which you only need to add the name of the file to be operated on -- except that you can't remember what is was. Tab will show you the whole directory; Z Tab will show you all the files beginning with Z and so on. And what's more, if your file is actually in a subdirectory, called, say, Zarathustra/part1, a second Tab after Zarathustra has completed (and BTW I completed that second Zarathustra just now by hitting Esc in a Cocoa app -- I assume we all know about that one...) will show me the Zarathustra directory contents.

The suggested bindkey reassignment of Tab kills this. Now it happens that there is a standard Emacs key assignment that does pretty well what complete-word-forward does. In Emacs it's called dabbrev-expand, and it's assigned by default to Alt-/, a key combo that isn't assigned to anything under Mac OS X's default shell. As the default bindkey assignment for tcsh is described as "Emacs-style", it seems pretty clear cut to me that a better key to put complete-word-forward on would be Alt/.

So my only question is, How do you represent Alt when doing a tsch bindkey assignment?

--
el bid


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An existing keybinding for TAB
Authored by: digitalee on May 15, '02 02:24:43AM
Thanks for encouraging me to spiff up my tcsh completions!

I agree that assigning alt / for complete-word-fwd seems to be more emacs keybinding compliant but it is rather difficult to get fingers around (that is unless you used DoubleCommand to reassign that useless ENTER key ;).....

However, while pouring through the tcsh man looking for the keybinding for alt I did discover that ^D (think Directory) accomplishes the same as the default TAB behaviour, this solution feels pretty natural to me. Try it on for size.

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