1

It's possible to ask completion to not suggest files with particular file extensions, by:

(setq completion-ignored-extensions
      (append completion-ignored-extensions
              (quote
               (".o" ".aux"))))

However, I'm not able to determine how to pattern-match on regular expressions before the "." and not just after it. For example, I don't want files that end with "_flymake.hs" to be suggested by completion modes. How could I accomplish this?

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4
  • Did you happen to try adding "_flymake.hs" to the list to see if it worked? I'm wanting to say that extensions really just means "end of filename"
    – Jonathan Leech-Pepin
    Commented Sep 29, 2015 at 11:31
  • @JonathanLeech-Pepin thanks, I tried that. It doesn't seem to work though, at least in a Helm find files buffer.
    – Rob Stewart
    Commented Sep 29, 2015 at 11:38
  • Are those really regular expressions? Dot character has special meaning in regex, if you want to use literal dot, you need to escape it: \.. Also, you want to only match files where these string happen at the end of the string, i.e. "\\.\\(:?o\\|aux\\)$".
    – wvxvw
    Commented Sep 29, 2015 at 12:20
  • I was using this document as my example: glue.umd.edu/afs/glue.umd.edu/system/info/olh/Text/Text_Editors/… , starting (setq completion-ignored-extensions ... )
    – Rob Stewart
    Commented Sep 29, 2015 at 12:27

2 Answers 2

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1

The dot is not special in completion-ignored-extensions, so

(push "_flymake.hs" completion-ignored-extensions)

should do the job. If it doesn't, then I'd guess that it's either because completion-ignored-extensions is not used (or used incorrectly) by the completion system you're using, or because all the candidates would be eliminated by completion-ignored-extensions.

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1

  1. Does your completion system/mode even support regexp matching? Vanilla Emacs completion does not, out of the box.

  2. At any rate, the patterns in completion-ignored-extensions are not regexps. They are not even filename glob patterns. They are literal text that file names must match at their ends. In particular, the . is not special, but matches a literal ..

  3. Adding "_flymake.hs" to completion-ignored-extensions should make completion ignore file names that end in that literal suffix. E.g., file name "foo_flymake.hs" should be ignored (not available as a completion candidates). Is this not what you see?

  4. Provide a recipe to reproduce your problem, given knowledge of #1-3, above.

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