Tab-completion

[John W. Eaton]

On 28-Aug-2009, John B. Thoo wrote:

| Hi.  I have a question about Tab-completion.  I'm using Octave 3.2.2  
| on Mac OS X 10.4.11.
| 
| If I want to drill down to the folder
| 
|    ~/Desktop/NumMethPractice/
| 
| for example, in Octave I type
| 
| octave-3.2.2:1> cd ~/Des
| 
| and press Tab to complete the name:
| 
| octave-3.2.2:1> cd ~/Desktop/
| 
| But if I continue now to type
| 
| octave-3.2.2:1> cd ~/Desktop/Num
| 
| then press Tab to complete the name, nothing happens.  Instead I have  
| to go to a new line and type
| 
| octave-3.2.2:2> cd Num
| 
| and now pressing Tab completes the name to give
| 
| octave-3.2.2:2> cd NumMethPractice/
| 
| What am I doing wrong?

Probably nothing, it's just that filename completion isn't really as
functional as it should be.  The particular problem here is that
Octave normally sets / to be a work-break character for readline
completion.  It shouldn't do this if it is completing a filename, but
the trick is to know when filename completion is happening vs when
variable and function name completion is happening.  It is not a
simple as it seems.  I would welcome patches to fix this problem
provided that the changes don't break other things.  For example, see
the recent thread

  
https://www-old.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/octave-maintainers/2009-August/012986.html

jwe