• My home page

readline auto-completion patch

While typing at the shell, I find that I keep pressing tab to complete commands. As the completion may not be unique, I might have to press tab several times to complete a word. Some people might argue that this is not an overly onerous chore, but it annoyed me so I made a patch to readline.

Functionality

The patched readline scans for possible completions and completes words as you type. If you don't like a completion, just keep on typing and it will be overwritten.

Todo

• Syntax coloring
• Some way of turning it off at runtime
• There is a problem of $VAR/ being expanded to $VAR/{value} in bash. This is not yet resolved, because the information about where $VAR starts is lost before the completion stage in my algorithm.

Installation

Unfortunately, still no RPMs. Here are several versions of the patch to pristine readline-4.*, which is itself available from gnu.org.

You have to compile and install.

$ tar zxvf readline-4.2a.tar.gz
$ cd readline-4.3a
$ patch -p1 < ../readline-4.2a-autocomplete-2.patch
$ ./configure && make install install-shared
    

Then it is only a matter of integration with other packages. With the new bash-2.04, you can specify to configure --with-installed-readline. It works with yafc too.