Re: shell command completion gone

[Le Wang]

On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 6:11 AM, prad <prad@towardsfreedom.com> wrote:

certainly rusi and i appreciate your asking this since i tend to just

use it very passively being effectively a newbie. exploring the package
further gets you to really appreciate the wonderful work it really is!

Considering everything in the package, it's difficult for anyone to not use it "very passively".  I'm just getting reacquainted with it myself.  I think Drew's approach in designing the package was to put everything under the sun completion related in there and enable most of it by default.  The advantage of this approach is people can discover features "by accident".  The downside is the dramatic behavior changes can scare away people just testing the waters.

Rest assured, though, the behaviors you do not want can be disabled.  And if you notice something that could be a bug Drew is a super responsible and responsive maintainer.

Here is the use-case I find useful above all else icicles offers:

I want help with the function that searches regexps backwards.  I know that the keywords "backward" "regex" and "search" occurs in its name, but I don't know in what order.  Normally I would have to apropos several possible orders before finding the exact name.  With icicles, I can just use the `icicle-narrow-candidates' to interactively filter the completion list, to wit:

1. <C-h>fregex<shift-tab>
2. <M-*>back<shift-tab>
3. <M-*>search<shift-tab>

After each step, the completion candidates are narrowed, and whenever the list is short enough, I can pop into the completion list window and select it myself.

Drew's analogy for this is shell piping into successive greps.  I often find functions that I didn't know existed and are in fact better suited to my purpose by using this narrowing tool.

The wiki is a great place to get more info on icicles.  Drew is very active there.  Researching my little example above, I just found out that the <S-tab><M-*> can be shortened to just <S-spc>.

hth.

-- 
Le