Try to find an approximate match by popping the pattern list

[baskerville]

If z foo bar baz yields no matches and if z foo bar does, I'd like to be taken to that match when I isssue the first command.

So, I think it would be a good idea to pop the tokens list until either it's empty or a match was found.

[rupa]

I'm not into this. z is already kind of borderline with regard to Doing What You Expect, and I think this functionality would make it less obvious what to expect, rather than more.

I'll leave this open for a while, in case anyone else wants to opine, but for now I'm not

[orefalo]

IMHO, the functionality described above is nice, yet it shall be built into a different project. I recall reading something... let me try to find it.

[baskerville]

Maybe the behavior could be enabled through an environment variable and disabled by default.

[malexmave]

Sorry for necro, I typed this all up before seeing the last post is 5 months in the past, and don't want to let it go to waste.

What happens if you type z foo bar baz and you would get a match on z bar baz (so the foo is the offender)? Your method of popping from the end would still yield no proper results if I understand it correctly.

So you would have to remove a parameter, check if you get a match, if not, put it back and check the next, if you don't get a match on any of them, start removing two params, ...

You could probably do that, but it's not very friendly.

I don't know how the list of results is generated, but if it works using some kind of ANDs on the results, you could add a switch that tells z to match using OR instead of AND, making parameters optional, if you understand what I mean.

[rupa]

Arguments are treated as regular expressions, and they are ANDed together. it's perfectly feasible to have a single argument with regex or in it e.g. z a\|b matches on a OR b