[BUG] :e <directory>

[donaldcallen]

Version of Kakoune

Kakoune 2024.05.18

Reproducer

Enter :e and then begin typing a directory that is in the current directory. When the correct directory appears in the bar above the command area, press tab. You will get the entire directory name followed by '/', but the contents of the directory do not appear. However, instead of pressing tab to complete the dirname, you type the rest of it instead, followed by the /, you are now shown the contents of the directory. So the same characters (the dirname + /) follow the :e in both cases, but the outcomes are very different. Furthermore, in the first case (where the contents of the directory are not shown), if you press up-arrow or right-arrow, the contents of the directory will be shown. Where is this documented? I was not able to find it.

Outcome

Already described above.

Expectations

I expect the same argument to :e, however you arrive at it, to produce the same outcome -- the contents of the directory.

Additional information

I'm running kak on an up-to-date Arch Linux system.

[Parasrah]

@donaldcallen I believe this is intentional as part of how the tab completion works. Imagine we have a directory structure like so:

.
├── foo
│   ├── first.txt
│   └── second.txt
└── foot
    ├── fourth.txt
    └── third.txt

3 directories, 4 files

And we open kakoune in this directory. Let's imagine that we want to navigate to foot/third.txt, so we start typing fo<tab>. We now have an auto-completion for both foo and foot, with foo being selected. That's not what we want, so we again insert <tab>. Now foot is selected.

However, what if we knew we wanted foo/first.txt? We could use tab-completion to complete and select the directory via :e fo<tab><c-y>, or we could type out the full directory name with a slash: :e foo/. The slash indicates in this case that you are "selecting" that directory, similar to <c-y>, as by inserting a slash it is asserting that you do indeed intend to open a file in that dir. The helpful thing for the completion engine to do in this case is list the nodes in said directory.

Speaking for myself, I think the current behavior is what I want kakaoune to do, and I don't imagine you're going to find many proponents of changing it.

[donaldcallen]

Yes, you are right. When you enter enough of the directory name to be unambiguous, it does the right thing. Thanks for setting me straight on this.

[krobelus]

yeah; to put it differently: tab completion is not supposed to be a destructive action. It should be possible to undo `tab` with `s-tab`. But as soon as you do anything else, a new completion session will start. `refresh_completions()` is the responsible function. Would be interesting to find out if the insert mode completion approach would work better here.