Re: a suggested solution for better external' completion in certain emacs modes

[Alex Schroeder <alex@emacswiki.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> That's too bad, but if you're in comint, you get comint's history
> feature.  That is the only thing that makes sense.  However, we could
> arrange for comint to save history from one invocation to the next, if
> that is desired.

Right now it is up to the authors of comint-using modes to do that.
sql-mode for example does this at the end:

  ;; People wanting a different history file for each
  ;; buffer/process/client/whatever can change separator and file-name
  ;; on the sql-interactive-mode-hook.
  (setq comint-input-ring-separator sql-input-ring-separator
	comint-input-ring-file-name sql-input-ring-file-name)
  ;; Calling the hook before calling comint-read-input-ring allows users
  ;; to set comint-input-ring-file-name in sql-interactive-mode-hook.
  (comint-read-input-ring t)

And when the process is stopped:

  (comint-write-input-ring)

So the machinery is already in place.

I do agree that the history is far too small for today's standards.
comint-input-ring-size's value is 32 -- this is ok if all you can do
is move up and down the list, but these days we can list all matching
input, we can search backwards, etc.  32 makes no sense.  On my system
I set it to 500.

Alex.
-- 
.O.  http://www.emacswiki.org/alex/
..O  Schroeder's fifth law:
OOO  Never accept more work than you can handle in one night of hacking.