feature request for substring matching in autocompleters

[JeffMelton]

Following on from the discussion in #932, I'll log this as a feature request so it may be easier for you to track. I'd like to be able to type: program_or_function_name 1234<tab> and get back all completions matching the 1234 substring, e.g., us01234-prod, gb12345-dev, etc.

[lmorg]

This has been pushed to develop branch.
https://dev.murex.rocks/commands/autocomplete.html#allowsubstring

[JeffMelton]

Sweet. I'll see if I can get it compiled tonight. Thanks!

[JeffMelton]

Fantastic. Quick and easy build, and my completer seems to work just like I'd hoped. I'll drive the dev build tomorrow and see how it goes. Thanks so much!

[JeffMelton]

One thing I've noticed occasionally is that when I tab to complete, I'll see the substring and the completion suggestion concatenated in the hints area:

Not a huge deal, but a minor little quirk to consider if you get down to nitpicking on this feature. Thanks again for your help on these!

[lmorg]

Nice spot.

I suspect I know where in the code this is failing. My suspicion is it's due to the way Murex delays some autocompletion results. It basically tries to get a response and if one doesn't arrive within shell autocomplete-soft-timeout (which defaults at 150ms) then it pushes the processing to a background thread so readline results still feel snappy even with longer running completion scripts. It does sometimes lead to quirks like these when results arrive in unexpected orders. And it would be sporadic because it's a race condition behind caching (ie autocomplete results are cached so you cannot immediately recreate the problem).

I'll have a play and see if I can solve this issue.