completion issues

[neogeographica]

• Completion doesn't work after placeholder arg that uses quotes.

I need to re-investigate, but I think what is happening is that e.g. if you hit tab after foo="bar" baz, instead of CUR being baz it ends up being bar" baz. (And the preceding word is =".)

It works if you hit tab after "foo=bar" baz, but that's annoying as you don't always need quotes in front of the option, in fact you very rarely do unless the value is a filepath with spaces in it. Also putting a quote before foo prevents autocomplete from working when typing foo, although I guess I could massage that.

Not sure what the fix is (or even why COMP_WORDS is getting split in that exact way to begin with.) Since I know placeholders are formed from a very limited set of characters I could try to re-glue/re-split COMP_WORDS if I see a case like this, but I'm dubious that I can be sure that I'm not seeing something from inside a placeholder value.

• Would be nice to have filepath completion for some placeholder values.

E.g. after map=/home use tabs here and there to help autocomplete the whole path.

Problem is, there's no metadata to tell the system that a particular placeholder value is a filepath, and I don't know if trying to introduce that is the right thing to do.

[neogeographica]

Interesting development on item 1...

Testing the word splitting with this little completion function:

_testcomp()
{
    echo
    echo "COMP_WORDS:"
    local COMP_WORDS_SIZE=${#COMP_WORDS[@]}
    for WORD in "${COMP_WORDS[@]}"
    do
      echo $WORD
    done
    echo
}
complete -F _testcomp testcomp

On Linux with bash version 4.4.20(1)-release, if I type testcomp hi="ho ho" foo and hit tab, I get:

COMP_WORDS:
testcomp
hi
="
ho
ho" foo

However on macOS with bash version 5.1.4(1)-release I get the much more sensible:

COMP_WORDS:
testcomp
hi
=
"ho ho"
foo

This may just be a bug fixed in bash, and another reason to recommend (if not outright require) a minimum bash version. Need to try updating my bash version on Linux.

edit: yep look like that was fixed in bash 5: "iiii. Fixed a problem with splitting double-quoted words for programmable completion when the double quote immediately follows another word delimiter."

[neogeographica]

Closing this; will open new issue for the filepath thing.