Re: Help overriding a single flag’s completion action

[Langbart <Langbart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday, October 13th, 2025 at 9:48 AM, Eric Cook <llua@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 10/13/25 1:34 AM, Langbart wrote:
> 
> > > Could you advise on the correct approach?
> > 
> > I tried zstyle first but never found the right syntax; using compdef with a helper function worked.
> 
> zstyle :completion::complete:fabric:\:option--model-1 fake foo bar baz
> 
> you type fabric --model and press ^xh to invoke _complete_help to get the `context' the completion system has


Thanks, the _complete_help/_complete_debug hotkey was a useful advice, to see
that the argument is called option--model-1 and not --model. 

I was able to add fake values but not overwrite the original ones.

I believe this is because the original _fabric_models function doesn't process
any additional arguments passed to it.

After altering the original completion function
from: compadd -X "Models:" ${models}
  to: compadd -X "Models:" "$@" ${models}

This change allowed me to use the following in .zshrc to show only my custom completions. 

zstyle ':completion::complete:fabric*:*:option--model-1' fake-always foo bar
zstyle ':completion::complete:fabric*:*:option--model-1' ignored-patterns '*'

Alternatively, zstyle -e with a helper function worked as well, but I had to set
_comp_ignore=() to hide other values from the original call.

_fab_wrap() {
  local -a _comp_ignore=()
  local -a my_itmes=(
    'alpha:100k'
    'beta:20k'
    'gamma:4k'
  )
  _describe '' my_itmes
}

zstyle -e ':completion::complete:fabric*:*:option--model-1' fake-always _fab_wrap
zstyle ':completion::complete:fabric*:*:option--model-1' ignored-patterns '*'

However, the original function (_fabric_models) still calls the vendor API to
fetch the models, causing a slight delay. As I can’t fully prevent that function
from running for this flag via zstyle, I’ll stick to the compdef workaround.