Re: [vile] Quiet prompts?

[Marc Simpson]

Thanks for the detailed explanation Thomas; appreciated.

I'm pretty sure I'll get used to the prompting.

On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 4:20 PM, Thomas Dickey <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 03, 2016 at 10:38:48AM -0800, Marc Simpson wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> I'm wondering whether there's a flag to reduce the amount of prompting
>> from common commands? Coming from (n)vi, I find the changes a tad
>> distracting for, e.g., substitution.
>
> no - there is none.  It would be awkward to introduce because of a long-ago
> design choice for the way vile does name-completion.
>
> vi and nvi don't do name-completion (vim does, but I'd have to do some
> study to clearly describe the tradeoffs -- offhand, I'd summarize it as
> saying that vim's input parsing is not organized into states as vile's
> is, but that it works on the whole command-string).
>
> With vile, you can press tab twice and (where appropriate...) get some
> useful name-completion in a popup-window.  There's nothing appropriate
> in the middle of a regular expression, of course.
>
> In vile when I started working with Paul Fox, the prompting was pretty
> much as you see it.  vile reads a command-line in a sequence of prompts
> for logical parts, e.g., the address, the command, the parameters.
>
> We (counting Kevin Buettner) added name-completion based on that
> progression, and (with some pain) got vile to work consistently when
> crossing the boundaries of the parts of a command.  Part of that deals
> with splicing the parts together and appending the completed command
> into the [History] buffer.  Another design choice was made to use the
> [History] buffer for scrolling through command-history.
>
> If it were modified to make the prompts optional, then that would make
> the command-line read as a single string (no separate states for the
> address, command, parameters).  The scripting interface does that, but
> doesn't do name-completion.
>
> --
> Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
> http://invisible-island.net
> ftp://invisible-island.net