Re: [PATCH/RFC] completion: complete all possible -no-<options>

[Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 7:36 AM, Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> wrote:
> I haven't looked at the implementation, so this may be an entirely
> stupid suggestion, but would it be possible to instead render the
> completions as?
>
>     % git checkout --<tab>
>     --[no-]conflict=                   --[no-]patch
>     --[no-]detach                      --[no-]progress
>     --[no-]ignore-other-worktrees      --[no-]quiet
>     --[no-]ignore-skip-worktree-bits   --[no-]recurse-submodules
>     --[no-]merge                       --theirs
>     --[no-]orphan=                     --[no-]track
>     --ours
>
> This would address the problem of the --no-* options taking double the
> screen space.

It took me so long to reply partly because I remember seeing some guy
doing clever trick with tab completion that also shows a short help
text in addition to the complete words. I could not find that again
and from my reading (also internet searching) it's probably not
possible to do this without trickery.

> It's also more intuitive than that lone and somewhat weird-looking
> "--no-" suggestion.

It's not that weird if you think about file path completion, where you
complete one path component at a time not full path, bash just does
not show you full paths to everything.

I'm arguing about this because I want to see your reaction, because
I'm thinking of doing the very same thing for config completion. Right
now "git config <tab>" gives you two pages of all available config
variables. I'm thinking that we "git config <tab>" just shows the
groups, e.g.

> ~/w/git $ git config
add.              interactive.
advice.           log.
alias.            mailmap.
am.               man.

Only when you do "git config log.<tab>" that it shows you log.*
-- 
Duy