Re: spacebar completion (warning - off topic)

[David Klein <dklein@bloombergREMOVETHISPART.com>]

Kester Clegg <kester@cs.york.ac.uk> writes:

> One thing I love in the minibuffer window is spacebar completion as an
> alternative to tab completion.  I use bash as my shell and it has most
> of the simple emacs key bindings for CL editing, except it insists on
> using tab as the completion key.  Does anyone know how I can get it use
> the spacebar like emacs does?
> 
As they say: "Be careful what you wish for, you might get it."

Are you sure you really want this? In emacs, one typically is entering
one "entity" at a time. When more than one entity is needed, you are
given seperate prompts. Because of this, the mini-buffer almost never
needs to have a space in it, so the spacebar can be used for
completion. Even in emacs this is often turned off though, e.g. with
`compile' and `grep' where the minibuffer can contain spaces. Can you
imagine the misery of trying to type

for x in *.f; do echo $x; done

if every time you hit the spacebar a whole set of completions came up?

-- 
Use of tools distinguishes Man from Beast. And UNIX users from WINDOZE lusers.