spacebar completion (warning - off topic)

spacebar completion (warning - off topic)

[Kester Clegg]

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?

-- 
************************************************************************
Kester Clegg				Dept. of Computer Science,
Research Assistant (UTC)		University of York, 
Tel (01904) 43 27 49			email: kester at cs.york.ac.uk
************************************************************************

Re: spacebar completion (warning - off topic)

[David Klein]

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.

Re: spacebar completion (warning - off topic)

[Kester Clegg]

David Klein <dklein@bloombergREMOVETHISPART.com> writes:

> 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?

Yes, you are right.  Though in truth I rarely type the above, it would
be a PITA the once-in-6-months I did need to!  I forgot emacs might be
applying its completion rules more selectively than I imagined.  :-)


-- 
************************************************************************
Kester Clegg				Dept. of Computer Science,
Research Assistant (UTC)		University of York, 
Tel (01904) 43 27 49			email: kester at cs.york.ac.uk
************************************************************************

Re: spacebar completion (warning - off topic)

[Bijan Soleymani]

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?
I don't know how emacs uses spacebar for completion, but if you did
that in bash you would be able to type the space in:
emacs file.txt

because it would want to complete emacs to emacsclient or something.

Bijan