Re: [vile] Quiet prompts?

[Thomas Dickey]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2016 at 10:38:48AM -0800, Marc Simpson wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I'm wondering whether there's a flag to reduce the amount of prompting
> from common commands? Coming from (n)vi, I find the changes a tad
> distracting for, e.g., substitution.

no - there is none.  It would be awkward to introduce because of a long-ago
design choice for the way vile does name-completion.

vi and nvi don't do name-completion (vim does, but I'd have to do some
study to clearly describe the tradeoffs -- offhand, I'd summarize it as
saying that vim's input parsing is not organized into states as vile's
is, but that it works on the whole command-string).

With vile, you can press tab twice and (where appropriate...) get some
useful name-completion in a popup-window.  There's nothing appropriate
in the middle of a regular expression, of course.

In vile when I started working with Paul Fox, the prompting was pretty
much as you see it.  vile reads a command-line in a sequence of prompts
for logical parts, e.g., the address, the command, the parameters.

We (counting Kevin Buettner) added name-completion based on that
progression, and (with some pain) got vile to work consistently when
crossing the boundaries of the parts of a command.  Part of that deals
with splicing the parts together and appending the completed command
into the [History] buffer.  Another design choice was made to use the
[History] buffer for scrolling through command-history.

If it were modified to make the prompts optional, then that would make
the command-line read as a single string (no separate states for the
address, command, parameters).  The scripting interface does that, but
doesn't do name-completion.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net

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