Re: [Nano-devel] RFC: limiting the amount of position history

[Benno Schulenberg]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016, at 21:47, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On 13 Jan 2016 21:23, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
> > when wanting to search for something in nano, one can
> > type the first few characters of a previous search string
> > and then Tab will cycle through the ones that start with
> > those characters.
> 
> yes, i was thinking of search history.  we can't rebind behavior there
> afaict.

No, even if you try to unbind Tab, Tab will always cycle
through the matching previous search strings.

>  imo, ideally we'd just load the existing readline inputrc files.

That would require a major rewrite.

> > But when trying to open a file, Tab will just try to
> > complete the first few characters to a filename in the
> > current directory, and if there are multiple candidates
> > it will beep and a second Tab will bring up a list...
> 
> would be nice if there were history here

Yes.  But how to combine that with Tab completion of names
in the current dir?  It's of course nice to be able to do
^P ^P..., but if you can't Tab through the file history,
the usefulness of it is much reduced.

> > Weird, specialized functionality.
> 
> how so ?

Well, I was going to say: Tab on the command line never beeps.
But that is because I have 'set show-all-if-ambiguous on' in my
inputrc -- by default Tab does beep when it can't unambiguously
complete the current string.

But still, if one runs src/nano and types for example:
^R c <Tab>, it beeps and completes the string to "config",
another <Tab> beeps again without doing anything, and
a third <Tab> will take over the entire edit window with
a list of all the config* files.  First, the list is very
far away from where the cursor is.  Second, one cannot do
anything with this list, except look at it and decide which
other char to type.  Third, if I wanted a list, I would have
typed ^T.  Fourth, if I type another character, say "u", and
hit <Tab>, it will extend the string to "configure" and beep
again and show the normal edit window again, another <Tab>
will beep again and do nothing, and another <Tab> will bring
up a list again...  Tiring.

Just cycling through the matches would be quicker, less noisy,
and less visually distracting.  And it would match the behaviour
for search, so it would be more consistent (within nano).

Benno

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