Re: address@hidden: some other observations on pcomplete]

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> On Sun Mar 10, RMS writes:

> * It's inconsistent with the rest of emacs.  Instead of doing
>   partial completion and then showing me a list of completing
>   matches, it sometimes does a full completion of just one
>   alternative, which may lead me to believe that is the only match.

> * It's not even consistent with itself.  Sometimes it does a full
>   completion (if there are only a small number of possible
>   completions) but other times it displays a completion buffer.
>   That goes even further to reinforce my expectation that when a
>   full completion is made, that's the only available completion!

> * Sometimes I want to cd into a directory so I type some prefix of
>   the directory name.  Because of the two points above, I don't know
>   if that's the only match or not so I hit tab twice.  Now, since
>   that is the only match, I get a list of completions in the
>   subdirectory.

>   So completion on a directory name sometimes replaces a directory
>   name with another complete match, and sometimes it descends into
>   the directory and produces a completion list on files below.
>   Behavior is surprising.

These behaviors are all configurable.  Perhaps we should simple tell
shell.el to configure pcomplete so that it behaves like Emacs'
standard (and dumb yet straightforward) completion.

Noah, just set `pcomplete-cycle-completions' to nil.

John