Question

I’ve built a number of work-specific helper functions that could be useful for other members of my team&mdash. But I’ve written them all in Emacs’ Elisp, and getting them to convert from Notepad++ is NOT going to happen.

So, I’m thinking convert the functions to Perl. No problem.

Except I use ido-completion all the time to limit responses:

  (setq client (ido-completing-read 'Select a Client: ' '('IniTrade' 'HedgeCorp' 'GlobalTech' 'OCP') nil t)) 

EDIT: ido-completing-read is similar to completing-read, except that all the options are visible, and can be selected via cycling [arrow-keys, usually] or typing-completion. In the example above, the prompt would look like

  Select a Client: {IniTrade | HedgeCorp | GlobalTech | OCP} 

selections can be made on the left-most item by hitting RET, or by partial typing (in this case, the first letters are all unique, so that’s all that would be needed, and the matching item would become the left-most).

nil in the example is an unused param, but ‘t’ requires an exact match — eg, the user must make one of the selections. The function returns a string, such as ‘IniTrade’.

My ‘helper functions’ are for internal needs — opening a particular error log, restoring a batch to the server, etc. For these operations, the user needs to specify test or production environment, client, stage, etc. In almost all cases, these are string selections that are used for building another shell command. If a numeric item is returned, that could in turn be re-translated to a string — but since the selections are usually the required string, it would be nice if that step could be skipped. [end EDIT]

Is there a Perl equivalent? I’ve looked at Term::Prompt which offers up a numbered-menu… closest I’ve found. That’s not as pretty as ido-completion, and I’d still have to convert a numeric-result backwards to a string (not a major issue; just annoying).

While composing this, I noticed I used the term ‘menu’, so did some more searching and came up with Term::Menus. I haven’t tried this one yet.

Answer 1

Term::ReadLine may do what you’re looking for, though it’s probably more like ‘completing-read’ than ‘ido-completing-read’.