ali@rocky.UUCP (05/29/87)
[1> run emacs df0:in<ESC>clude/intu<ESC>ition/i<ESC>ntuition.h] Well if you've worked with file name completion the above line-eater line tells it all. How about adding file name completion to Conman? When you hit <ESCAPE>, Conman would go and find all the files which have the same prefix as the word you've typed so far, and type in the rest of the file name (upto the point where an ambuigity existed, if any). Tops-20 has this feature, and I was glad to see it included in 4.3 BSD. Of course, there's one bad news, and one good. The bad news is that we all know how fast AmigaDOS is when it comes to wildcard file name matching. Unless Conman did some extremely clever name caching (how does "ls" do it?), using this "feature" on floppies might slow things down instead of speeding them up. Of course, off of ramdisks or harddisk file name completion would be reasonably fast. Now, the good news is that any window opened with con: would have access to this file name completion facility! (I haven't played with Conman all that much yet, but if it does indeed work like how I understand it does, then if the programmer asks for a file name with a simple scanf, the user will still be able to hit <ESC> and use file name completion, right? Under 4.3 BSD, the file name completion is available only at the shell level and does not work from within programs. This frustrates me sometimes. On Tops-20 file name completion can work from within programs if the programmer does some extra work and use some complicated (but very powerful) system calls instead of simple a "scanf" or "readln"...) Just an idea! Ali Ozer, ali@rocky.stanford.edu