Tab completion and ':'s

[Vadim Berezniker]

I'm working on adding tab completion to an application that deals with
URLs, among other things. Since readline includes ':' as a delimiting
character, it causes minor annoyances with tab-completing URLs. There's the
known workaround of removing ':' from COMP_WORDBREAKS, but that requires
every person that installs the application to apply the workaround, which
is slightly less than ideal.

I'm trying to see if there's a better solution that doesn't require any
action from the user. One thought I had was what if readline/bash allowed
control over the insertion point of the completion result? i.e. if there
was a COMP_INSERT_POINT variable that could get/set the insertion point. Is
that feasible?