Section 4.3: Managing the Completion Index

TouchTerm's Text Completion interface is driven by the "Term Index", which is created based upon typed input and screen output.

There are several Options that control how terms are added to the Term Index:

• Index Output: This Option controls whether or not all text displayed on the Terminal screen is added to the Completion engine's database. When this Option is turned Off, none of the Terminal output is added to the Completions index.
• Index Punctuation: If the Index Output option is turned On, this Option controls whether or not terms containing non-word characters are indexed in the Completions database. When this Option is turned On, all terms, including those with punctuation or special characters, are indexed; when this Option is turned Off, only terms containing alphanumeric characters only are added to the index. In both cases, any alphanumeric substrings (of sufficient length) of terms in the Terminal output are indexed.
  
  As an example, suppose the Terminal display shows bash-3.2$ echo -- when this Option is turned Off, only the terms 'bash' and 'echo' are added to the index. When this Option is turned On, the terms 'bash', 'bash-3.2$', and 'echo' are added to the index.
• Index Input: This Option controls whether or not input (typed) terms are added to the Completions index. When this Option is turned On, all commands and terms (of sufficient length) that are typed in are added to the Completions index.
  
  Indexed input is also given a small 'score' preference over output terms, which means that previous inputs will appear higher in the Completions list than terms that have only been seen in the Terminal output display.
• Index Individual Input Words: If the Index Input option is turned On, this Option controls whether or not individual words in the input are added to the Completions index. When this Option is turned Off, only entire input lines (separated by the 'return' key) are added to the Completions index; when this Option is turned On, both entire input lines and all alphanumeric words contained in them (of sufficient length) are added to the index.
  
  As an example, suppose you have typed echo Hello from TouchTerm. at a shell prompt. When this Option is turned Off, only the entire command is indexed as one string; when this Option is turned On, the terms 'echo', 'Hello', 'from', and 'TouchTerm' are also added to the index (in addition to the full command).

Note also that the minimum term length that will ever be added to the Term Index is four characters.

Finally, there are also some Actions that can be used to control your Term Index. Use the Reset Completion Index action to completely reset and remove all terms from your Completion Index. The Prune Completion Index removes only "Zero Score" entries from your Completion Index; that is, it will remove all terms from your Completion Index that have only been seen in the output, and that you have never selected from the Completion Interface.

You can also use the "Database Size" field in the Information section of the Settings menu to get an idea of how big your Completion Index is; this size includes all configuration data used by TouchTerm, but as is grows, the majority of of this growth is likely to be due to the Completion Index.