! ! ! breaks ivy--exhibit

[Wilfred]

Typing "! ! ! " in the minibuffer with counsel-M-x produces:

Error in post-command-hook (ivy--exhibit): (error "Unexpected: use only one !")

This seems to happen with all counsel commands. Once this error has been triggered, ivy stops filtering results until you C-g and try again.

I'm using ivy--regex-ignore-order in ivy-re-builders-alist.

[abo-abo]

Thanks, I did some testing to reproduce the bug.

(should (equal (ivy--regex-ignore-order "^v f") '(("^v" . t) ("f" . t))))
(should (equal (ivy--regex-ignore-order "^v ! f") '(("^v" . t) ("f"))))
(should (equal (ivy--regex-ignore-order "^v") '(("^v" . t))))
(should (equal (ivy--regex-ignore-order "^v! ") '(("^v" . t))))

The last test fails. Could you look into fixing it (if I remember correctly, some of ivy--regex-ignore-order code is yours)?

How it's supposed to work: everything after the last ! are negation groups, separated by spaces. They should not match, e.g. ("f" . nil) instead of ("f" . t) as in the test above.

But that means currently that it's impossible to match a literal !. My suggestion is to deal with exclamation marks same as with spaces: !! translates to a literal !, !!! to literal !! etc.

[Wilfred]

Ha, I bumped into this again today when trying to search for literal !. I'll try to write a PR.

How do you feel about using \! for a literal !? This would be more consistent with regexp special characters.

[abo-abo]

That's fine as well.