Re: psql tab completion for SELECT

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Robert Haas wrote:

> One thing that's been bugging me for a while is that the tab
> completion code all works by looking backward up to n words. What we
> really want to know is what kind of statement we're in and where we
> are in it. Absent other information, if we're in the target list of a
> SELECT statement (nested arbitrarily) that behavior is reasonable. If
> we're someplace in a GRANT statement, or someplace in a CREATE
> STATEMENT where, say, a column name is expected, it's really not.

I played with this years ago, but readline does not really offer a
good way to easily get what we want (the whole statement, chunked into
nice bits to analyze). Of course at this point we should think about
making things more generic so we can drop in whatever readline-alternative
comes along in the future.

> Unfortunately, making the tab completion something other than
> incredibly stupid is likely to be an insane amount of work.

Insane amount of work? Check. Inredibly stupid? No, I think we've done
pretty good given the limitations we have. You want to see incredibly
stupid, see some of the *other* CLIs out there (hi, mysql! :)

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg(at)turnstep(dot)com
End Point Corporation http://www.endpoint.com/
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