1) In the specific instance I hit when I wrote that comment I wanted a variant of `**/*(.Om)`, which gives me files sorted by mtime. I think I'd probably have ended up with a `find ... | xargs stat -c '%Y-%n' | sort -n | sed "s,^[0-9]\+-,,"` construct if I'd kept at it, but I'm sure there are some more reasonable ways I'm struggling to think of right now with my extended glob blinkers on.

2)

Yeah, I'd go the fish route if I had to do the work too ;) It is a huge step up from bash-completion, whilst still being easy to understand.

zsh's completion is unbelievably powerful, but also exceedingly complex once you move beyond basic file completion. Anything beyond even the most basic example tends to be littered with other zsh-isms too(said with the love of someone who submits such monstrosities to projects on a semi-regular basis).

[Edit: I just spotted a patch I submitted to bash-completion almost twenty years ago², I've been chasing this "perfect tooling" tail for a long time.]

3)

zsh allows fully customisable interactions by defining custom widgets within ZLE¹. Like many things with zsh they're super powerful once you work your way through the learning curve.

I have added a few `$if oil` blocks to my ~/.inputrc to workaround a few of the edit sequences I like to have available, but beyond the built-in readline functions and basic mappings readline feels quite limited to someone accustomed to zle. I'd just have to get used to some of the other functionality needing to be external tooling, and extracting things out of the shell would probably make a lot of sense anyway.

--

Also -- if you made it this far -- let me reiterate how much I appreciate the work you're doing. I've learnt heaps reading through both your posts in the blog and your comments here!

¹ https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Zsh-Line-Editor.html#...

² https://github.com/oilshell/bash-completion/commit/24ab16438...