Results tagged “perldoc-complete”

Bash perldoc completion tweaks

Remember when I wrote the following?

Completion in bash is hard-wired to understand trailing slashes as “the user might want to do more completion right after this” – we want :: treated that way instead but there is no way to tell bash.

This is still true, but reading the manpage a little less carelessly reveals that passing -o nospace to the complete command tells bash to simply never append a space, which achieves what is desired without hacks.

While I was in there, I found -o default, which means that if the completion generator returned no results, bash should use its default completion generator instead. This is very useful.

Previously, with “.” in your @INC (as it commonly is), all directories directly inside the current working directory would be included in the completions list as suggested namespaces, because perldoc-complete has no way of knowing which of them contain modules and which don’t. (It would have to recurse, which is too expensive.) But since there is a way to fall back to bash’s default filesystem completion, I have added an extra check that removes not only the home directory from @INC, but the current directory as well.

If you want to complete on documentation in modules somewhere below the current directory, simply type perldoc ./<Tab> etc to use standard path completion. Or perldoc /<Tab> to complete on an absolute path.

Share and enjoy.

Summary

  • No more ugly fake suggestions to force ambiguity
  • No more spurious namespace suggestions outside your home directory
  • You can now complete on paths as well as namespaces by starting the path with / or ./
  • Existing users will have to change their .bashrc line to
    complete -C perldoc-complete -o nospace -o default perldoc

More bash completion help for perldoc

Yesterday’s posting got a fair bit of response. Among other feedback, I had some feature requests from Offer Kaye in my email today.

So now perldoc-complete will complete built-in Perl functions if you’ve typed perldoc -f (try it with eg. perldoc -f ch<Tab>) and it will also complete Perl’s documentation pages – although for uncluttering’s sake, it will hide the list if you’ve merely typed perldoc <Tab>.

Share and enjoy.

A bash completion helper for perldoc

A month ago, Yanick Champoux wrote a note about helpers for browsing the POD in your your local perl install.

His first script is for firing up a browser pointed at a local POD web server, including starting one up if it’s not already running – not that useful to me, since I haven’t found myself actually using these servers very much, because of the console↔browser flipping that they entail. Plain old perldoc on a console just feels faster to juggle.

However, he also includes another script: a completion helper for bash. This allows you to type something like perldoc Cata<tab> and have bash turn it into perldoc Catalyst for you. I used this script for mere hours before I realised it’s exactly the one thing I have always missed in Perl: a way to quickly and efficiently browse my local module library – the thing that all the POD web servers promised to give me, but couldn’t deliver in a convenient enough fashion for me to use routinely.

But as presented, his script has one limitation that annoyed me more than perhaps I should have let it: you have to use your system directory separator (ie. slash on Unixoid systems) en lieu of Perl’s :: package separator. Ie.: you cannot type perldoc Catalyst::Re<tab>, it has to be perldoc Catalyst/Re<tab>.

I thought that should be easy to fix. (Famous last words, I know.) It turned out to be harder than expected due the fact that completion in bash is hard-wired to understand trailing slashes as “the user might want to do more completion right after this” – we want :: treated that way instead but there is no way to tell bash. I also ended up rewriting the script to be more (theoretically) portable, to not require non-core dependencies, and to work on much older perls than just 5.10.0, as Yanick’s code requires. Fastidious as I always am, I also spent quite a bit of effort rewriting the code to make it more beautiful and easy to skim and understand.

So without further ado: share and enjoy.

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