Sort completions

[ghost]

Current sorting (none):

$ systemd-<tab>
systemd-cat                     (Executable, 26kB)
systemd-cgls                    (Executable, 46kB)
systemd-cgtop                   (Executable, 54kB)
systemd-delta                   (Executable, 38kB)
systemd-notify                  (Executable, 30kB)
systemd-nspawn                  (Executable, 90kB)
systemd-analyze                 (Executable, 62kB)
systemd-inhibit                 (Executable, 38kB)
systemd-tmpfiles                (Executable, 62kB)
systemd-coredumpctl             (Executable, 42kB)
systemd-detect-virt             (Executable, 30kB)
systemd-ask-password            (Executable, 38kB)
systemd-stdio-bridge           (Executable, 110kB)
systemd-machine-id-setup        (Executable, 34kB)
systemd-tty-ask-password-agent  (Executable, 58kB)

Probably would be helpful to sort them, although, this can potentially cause performance problems for large lists.

[zanchey]

They are sorted - just not in the way you might expect! They are sorted on length then on alphabetical ordering.

I think this is a bug.

[zanchey]

Ah, sorting is done with wcscmp and our own wcsfilecmp, where longer strings are greater than shorter strings.

[ghost]

...I did not notice this. I think that it's because the shorter strings are more likely to fuzzy-match, whereas in this case, it's probably better to have them just be sorted alphabetically if it's a prefix match.

[ridiculousfish]

The list is sorted by length.

The issue here is in determining the distance ("goodness") of a match. For a fuzzy match, i.e.: iff<tab> we should obviously prefer diff to tiffdither. In most cases, shorter matches are better because a larger percentage of characters are matched, so the list is effectively sorted by length.

Are there circumstances where this is not so? Maybe for prefix matches?

[ridiculousfish]

Let's try sorting prefix match strings alphabetically, and fuzzy match strings by length, and see how weird that is.

[ridiculousfish]

Implemented here: c38a40d . let's see how this feels.

Thanks for reporting this!