Re: Is it time to create more subdirs in lisp/?

[Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>]

On 6 Sep 2011, Stefan Monnier outgrape:

>>> […] OTOH it would also be good for Emacs to be able to better
>>> handle such deep hierarchies.
>>> Currently, the file-selector offers the possibility to type "~/e/e/e
>>> TAB" or even "~/eee TAB" to mean "~/etc/emacs/emacs.el", but it'd be
>>> good to be able to go further (maybe not as default, but via some new
>>> completion-style).
>
>> zsh has a completion system like this with pretty nice feature set
>> and a fair bit of real-world experience, if anyone is looking for a model.
>
> I'm a long time zsh user, but AFAIK zsh has fairly simple
> completion support.  You can program the completion system à la
> pcomplete (i.e. to instruct zsh which completion table to use for the
> various args of the commands you use), but the completion itself is only
> using prefix completion and/or cycling in my experience.

It's... grown (perhaps 'metastasized' would be a better term). ls
l/pcm*el can autocomplete to lisp/pcomplete.el easily. It does prefix,
suffix and infix completion, environment vbariable completion, fuzzy
spelling correction, automatic recursion, you name it. It can display
menus, even multilevel ones, grouped in various ways as well as using
prefix completion or cycling.

You may find 'compinstall' interesting to play with.

> If there's more to it, I'd love to hear about it (admittedly, I haven't
> looked at zsh's doc in recent years so I may have missed such new
> features).

Shall we say that the zsh autocompletion system is now largely written
*in* zsh, has multiple layers (high-level and low-level, with the high-
level layer providing the display frontends to the low-level potential-
completion-computation layer) and occupies more than half the 500-page
manual. It's the single most hilariously overdesigned completion system
I have ever heard of, knocking Emacs off the perch which should rightly
belong to it :)

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