Re: Where do these completions come from?

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 12:13 PM Roman Perepelitsa
<roman.perepelitsa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Okay, understood.  But why is it useful to expand hashtable names
> > in command position?
>
> I don't think it's useful.

It's not "expanding" hashtable names, it's completing parameter names
because you might want to assign to them.  Having

% PA<tab>
% PATH=

would be a better example.  You don't get the "=" when there are
multiple possibilities.

> I don't know why the default is what it is. I don't expect zsh
> defaults to make sense. Why is interactive_comments disabled in
> interactive shells?

Because csh didn't have interactive comments, and zsh was designed to
help college students using BSD unixen migrate from default csh to a
bourne-like shell.

> Why does prompt show hostname but not the current
> directory?

There originally wasn't a prompt escape for directory, IIRC ... and
we're back to historical usage where users were on time-shared
machinery and might need to know.

> It's all for historical reasons, I guess.

Yep, in a lot of cases dating back to how universities in the USA in
the 1990s tended to configure their servers/users.