Tab completion and auto suggestion uses backslashes for escape characters instead of simply wrapping in quotes.

[rsheasby]

Hi team.
Running git master - fish, version 3.0b1-21-gfb679ac9c
Not sure if this was an active design decision, or if it was simply made this way to replicate the behavior of bash, but when you try to tab complete a directory with spaces in it for example, it will tab complete it with backslashes behind every space instead of simply wrapping the path in quotes which looks much cleaner and easier to read. It does the same for the autosuggestions. I was unable to find any pre-existing issue for this so apologies if this is a duplicate.

[faho]

Yeah, sounds fair enough.

We do already have a heuristic in escape_string_script, though it's a bit simple, and we seem to disable it somewhere in the completion/paging system.

[mqudsi]

I'm not sure which is more user-friendly for editing (rather than viewing), as one can immediately tack input on to the end of a \-escaped string but not a quote-escaped one.

I think if we go this route we need to do what cmd and powershell do for completions, which is a bit involved:

cd "C:\Program Files"\<TAB> is fixed to "C:\Program Files\" before offering suggestions, which would autocomplete to the full path with one level of quotes opening and closing at the start and end of the suggestion.

[faho]

one can immediately tack input on to the end of a -escaped string but not a quote-escaped one.

If we decide to use quotes in escape_string_script, we also (already!) close the quotes, so you can.

E.g. if there are two files, some file with spaces and some file with more spaces, we currently complete the common prefix as some\ file\ with\ , but we could also use "some file with ", and you could immediately go on, even changing it to "some file with "more\ spaces.

[mqudsi]

Yup, but autocompleting that again does not clean up the quotes.

[faho]

It actually does, and that bit has to be dealt with somehow because the user could also try to complete something inside quotes.

E.g.

touch "some file with spaces"
touch "some file with more spaces"

and then play around with e.g. ls "some<TAB>, and try closing the quote and completing some more, like with ls "some "<TAB>. It's already handled reasonably well.

[mqudsi]

I meant completing "/var"/lo<TAB> completes to "/var"/log/ without the quotes cleaned up to "/var/log/" (or dropped entirely in this case, as they aren't needed.

Regardless, there are certainly a lot of edge cases here.

One case that would probably be a straightforward switching of quoting modes would be argument/command completion from history, though. Unlike <TAB> completion, those are more "drop in place" rather than "build incrementally".

[floam]

This is desirable for completions, but not for autosuggestions. The mechanics of the autosuggestions are such that they are previewed as a dimmed out suffix shown on the command-line beyond your cursor. You can't have it changing the stuff already typed, at least not before accepting them, and that would probably be jarring.

[stellarpower]

Would some issues be simplified by providing a setting for a preferred escape form? Such that in any cases like the above where there's an ambiguity, or in other cases, Fish should always pick the preferred form, if the option is set.

Using a backslash is quicker to type in various situations, but I unanimously prefer quotes in any given situation - it's closer to programming languages, so helps highlight textual values rather than switches, comes up in a different colour, and scans an awful lot better to my eye - Fish really excels at the colours and formatting here, and I use a lot of spaces in my paths so it makes life a lot less stressful. For my situation, I'd happily set an option that Fish can/should always replace backslash escapes with quotes, be it as I'm typing, when I hit tab, etc. I hate when software makes an assumption for me, and to that end I think it would work well to make it an explicit option, also with the options for the reverse - for users who always prefer backslashes - and to leave as the default and change nothing. Don't know if this helps much internally, but as an external feature it's something that would work nicely for me at least. If explicitly setting a preferred quoting method would make some of the above corner cases resolvable, then it's an option I'd gladly set anyway.

[faho]

Would some issues be simplified by providing a setting for a preferred escape form?

No such setting will be added. That's not the way we do things.

We'll improve the heuristic or switch over to quoted style entirely, but not add a cheesy boolean flag you have to pick.

It's more annoying for everyone, because now you have to pick. It's also not simpler to implement, because now you have to implement the picking and the proper closing/opening/insertion/removal of quotes.

[floam]

Something else that I think could help is to make it so foo<tab> could complete an escaped space if in a dir with 'foo bar' and 'foo foo' files in it. Instead it actually removes the slash.